Comments on: Raising the bar of mobile browsing

By: AlastairC

AlastairC — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 16:26:59 +0000

Hi Paul,

I’ve seen that, but my point is that the guidelines (well, some of them anyway) don’t apply in the way they were intended to these newer mobile browsers.

The guidelines were aimed at small screen devices with limited rendering that do things linearly (not completely dissimilar to text browsers or screen readers).

When you add desktop rendering and zoom capability, you’ve shifted the interaction style to something more like a desktop browser with a screen magnifier.

By: Paul Walsh

Paul Walsh — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 16:30:01 +0000

Alastair – take a look at the W3C Mobile Web Initiative [1]. It has created Best Practices to help developers create Web sites that work on desktop computers as well as mobile devices.

[1] http://w3.org/mobile

Paul

By: AlastairC

AlastairC — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 18:57:28 +0000

“message codes it allows”

Err, yes, um, I don’t actually know myself yet! It’s what ever the default WordPress install allows, I haven’t customised it yet. I’ll find out and add something.

I’m also going to add that subscribe the comments pluggin that Bruce Lawson uses as well.

By: Ben 'Cerbera' Millard

Ben 'Cerbera' Millard — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 01:00:21 +0000

Non-standards-aware sites are probably using tables for layout and presentational markup, though! The screen stylesheet would normally just do fonts and colours…maybe the devs of some mobile browsers didn’t realise us weirdos use CSS for layout.

You’re right that the “Frankensteinesque” [1] results in some mobiles are normally a result of half-applying the media=”screen” stylesheet, from what I’ve seen.

Overriding all the layout stuff intended for desktop PCs in the media=”handheld” CSS cures a lot of this. Limiting the properties in this to colors, backgrounds and basic font styling means the stupid browsers don’t end up rendering anything complicated enough to choke on.

However, it certainly is great to see how the mobile browsers of the past couple of years have raised the bar. You might also check Minimo [2] if you have access to a Windows Mobile device. It’s basically Mozilla for mobiles.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/web-forms-2/#r-to-html5
[2] http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minimo/

Btw, how about a little note near this message form saying what message codes it allows, if any?

By: AlastairC

AlastairC — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 14:57:17 +0000

I guess the mobile browsers try and replicate the desktop rendering primarily because it works better for more sites (i.e. all the non-standards aware sites).

For those of us producing standards based sites, the old browsers are ok, and these two new ones are great.

However, there are only two mobile browsers I would consider testing with (and doing anything about), and mobile IE is not one of them! (It seems to suffer from the Frankenstein problem I mention above.)

By: Ben 'Cerbera' Millard

Ben 'Cerbera' Millard — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 14:09:58 +0000

I’ve had a casual interest in how the “desktop web” can work in handhelds since I convinced a friend to test Project Cerbera in one:
http://projectcerbera.com/misc/mobilesupport.html

This phone was old and had no noticable CSS support. It rendered the page a lot like a desktop browser at a narrow width with CSS turned off would do.

Since then I’ve had other websites tested in mobile devices. The biggest problem seems to be that some try to render desktop layouts (media=”screen”) on their tiny display area:
http://www.gtaforums.com/index.php?showtopic=241170

I’ve found that creating a handheld stylesheet (media=”handheld”) which overrides all the layout stuff of the main stylesheet can help with this.

I’ve seen some really strange rendering errors in the mobile IE browser which I can’t investigate since I don’t have that browser available to me.