Re: [GNU Herds service]: HTML + CSS + JavaScript-as-not-required-addition

[Victor Engmark]

On 4/13/07, Davi Leal <address@hidden> wrote:

Just a comment: About mobile phones, I have noted Google has a totally
different interface, with the heading removed, etc., etc. And they send
all the markup in only one line of text!.

I guess mobile users are the new modem users - They often pay per byte (not per month), their connections are really slow, and they have tiny screen space.

Actually, this is a major argument for avoiding tables for design - AFAIK they won't be serialized by mobile devices, so they'll have to scroll both horizontally and vertically. Mucho annoying :)

A few other tricks to make standard web pages work well on mobile devices:

• Don't rely on _javascript_. ;)
• Make sure the site works well without CSS. Easy to achieve if you're using semantic markup.
  
• Put menus last in the markup, and use CSS (floats) to make it appear at the top. I'm not sure I agree with this one, but it's been pointed out that you don't want to have to navigate past the menu for every page load, if it's used rarely.
• Use fluid layouts, so that users on CSS-enabled clients with extreme screen sizes aren't forced to scroll. This one also helps for huge resolutions. Ideally, the content should always take exactly the screen width.
  

Some more tips:
7 steps to better handheld browsing
Retrofit your Web pages for wireless compatibility

-- 
Victor Engmark
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur - What is said in Latin, sounds profound