How Optimized Can Mobile Sites Be?

Carlo at MobHappy has put up a post about trying to access a new Fandango site with movie listings only to receive the message: “Your device is currently not supported. Please check back soon — Fandango Mobile will be supporting devices on a regular basis.” As he points out, this is stupid. It’s a website, not an application, so it doesn’t need to be that customized for a handset. How customized can you make a bit of text and maybe some pictures anyway?
There are some efforts underway to standardize what rules a website needs to follow in order to display well on a mobile phone, which is a great initiative, but even now it’s fairly simple and any handset capable of browsing to the site should be able to read it.
Related stories:
.mobi To Use W3C Guidelines
Device Info Repository To Stimulate Mobile Web?
W3C Launches Mobile Web Initiative

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