samaxes

Web content delivered to mobile devices can benefit from being tailored to take into account a range of factors such as screen size, markup language support and image format support. Such information is stored in “Device Description Repositories” (DDRs).

Until recently WURFL was the de facto DDR standard for mobile capabilities, but its license changed to AGPL (Affero GPL) v3, meaning it is not free to be used commercially anymore. Consequently some free open source alternatives to WURFL have recently started to show up and are improving quickly.

OpenDDR and 51Degrees.mobi are candidate substitutes to WURFL that also provide an API to access DDRs.

These tools ease and promote the development of Web content that adapts to its delivery context. This post summarizes the installation and configuration of these tools and analyzes how they compare in terms of image adaptation.

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