ScientiaMobile

Is it possible to uniquely differentiate any one device from another using WURFL capabilities? In the computer world, theoretically speaking, any computer can be distinguished from any other computer by examining its MAC address. Is this possible in the mobile world using WURFL? I've looked through the list of capabilities and didn't see anything that would do this.

The reason I ask is that if such a unique identifier were available, whenever a device comes to my website, I could see if I have a capabilities profile associated with that device identifier. If I did, that would save me from having to re-fetch its capabilities. I suppose one could always create a profile for each device a user logs in with but that seems rather inelegant as you'd still need to query WURFL to get the device's capabilities to compare against that user's (multiple) device profiles. Thanks.

I am not sure I understand what you are asking for, unless you are asking for cookies, i.e. you look up device capabilities for each device once, and you make sure that the same information is piggybacked on top of cookies the next time a request from the same device comes in.

Another possibility is that you are talking about so-called "fingerprinting", i.e. trying to map an HTTP request to a user-profile. WURFL does not help there. While people sometimes get confused, this is really no one of the use-cases that WURFL covers.

Thanks