3 ms·
It was basically the Japanese equivalent of WAP before smartphones but it's completely irrelevant now and even when it was a thing, I'm not sure it was relevant
by resoluteteeth 6y ago
It was basically the Japanese equivalent of WAP before smartphones but it's completely irrelevant now and even when it was a thing, I'm not sure it was relevant to desktop sites like this article is talking about.
- busterarm 6y agoi-mode usage peaked in 2008. While it has been falling since, it probably only became irrelevant around the time this was written. A lot of the Japanese sites that I visit(ed) were designed for i-Mode first/only as late as 2011.
- resoluteteeth 6y agoMy understanding that i-mode markup was very limited and didn't include tables or css, so I don't think it would be possible for desktop sites from 2011 to have been designed for i-mode first. Common Japanese sites for desktop browsers from this period as described in the original article were extremely cluttered in a way that would have been completely impossible to read on a feature phone with i-mode. I believe that as with WAP, it was necessary to have completely separate i-mode sites, so I don't think the front end rendering of one would necessarily affect the other even if companies like Yahoo Japan were serving similar content over both.