Slashdot Mirror
Web Design Hampers Mobile Internet?
aws910 writes "Reuters is running an article on how flashy web design is impacting the usability of internet-enabled mobile devices, with quotes from Tim Berners-Lee. Although the article is sparse on details, it is an interesting topic for discussion. Having recently bought an internet-enabled cellphone, I can honestly say that most websites are painful to view on a 240x320 screen over a GPRS connection(EVDO is expensive/US-only). Have we moved away from 56K-modem-oriented design, only to be pulled back in that direction?"
IMO, broswing website using some silly little contraption is silly. Just view the sites on a regualr computer when it's more convenient. Or, every web designer should use CSS and have a handheld-friendly CSS option.
Or webdesigners can take the time to make websites that have slimmed down versions (text only Google News, Slashdot's lite (or completely customizable version, various sites that offer WAP detection).
I have a little utility that I wrote for geocachers to convert words to numbers via the "dollar word method". A guy I know complained that it wouldn't render on his WAP phone. I spent the 10 minutes using Google to figure out how to write it to work w/WAP and how to get Apache to detect WAP and rewrite the URLs.
Is it really that hard to do? Do we really need Flash and 100k page loads for a simple website?
No, we don't and it's not silly when you are sitting on the bus or train or in the mall waiting for your SO to shop.
Be serious.
Actually, the biggest reason SMS is so popular is cost. In most of Europe and Asia, the cost of a text message is a fraction of the per-minute charge for a voice call.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Use Weather Underground Mobile then and vote w/your "feet".
IIRC one of the guys from WU has a hiptop (T-mobile sidekick) and even went so far as to create a rocking WU client for it (which I use daily).
Actually, a CSS redesign of Slashdot has been offered, although there would be lots of heavy lifting to get it into slashcode. This part 2 of an article on /. redesign shows how /. renders on a mobile device currently (well, at least when the article was written), and how a CSS version would gracefully degrade in a portable browser.
(Part 1)
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
It's not (primarily) the web designers' fault that they use flashy designs. The people who get design contracts aren't the ones who use well-formed, W3C compliant XHTML that is functional even in text-based browsers. The people who get the contracts are the ones who have a 500KB Flash animation on every page and poorly coded Javascript rollovers because clients and PHBs see these things and go "Ooo! Shiny!"
t s design for when I first visit the page and am sucked in by beauty. Another CSS would have a minimalist UI that allows me to find the information on that site as fast as possible. Then handheld users would just use this latter lowbandwith UI by default instead of the flash hog. The web designers can just show the PHBs both versions so it is their fault that modern websites suck. They're making websites with 5 year old technology and the users are suffering for that.
The whole point of modern XHTML and CSS is so that web designers can seperate the function of the webpage (deliver content via XHTML) from the form (the particular layout using CSS) and let end users choose the CSS that they want. In theory this should have a minimal XHTML with just pure text and all the glitz should be added in via CSS. FF and similar browsers support switching between multiple stylesheets by defaul, but IE requires webdesigners to allow it via a Javascript widget. Thus, the designers just stick with the flash. Maybe IE7 will help change this if it doesn't suck as much as the previous versions or maybe not given the amount of glitz in Longhorn.
In an ideal world, one CSS would have the glitzy flash animation and postneoantimodernismdeco-that-will-win-art-contes
If you really want to see the power of proper XHTML+CSS, look at the CSS Zen Garden. The entire site uses a single XHTML file but each version of the main page has a different CSS file. If you didn't know this, you would think that each page was individually coded. And the site is still usable if you strip out the CSS and view just the plain XHTML file.
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Wired article as proof
http://slashdot.org/palm
For every karma whore there are four more people with mod points to kill.
Opera scales both text & images (even Flash) through its unique Zoom function.
;)
It's also the best browser out there anyway. And if you're too cheap to pay a few $$ to use the web the way you want when you've coughed up $hundreds on a monitor, quit complaining.
Viewing Slashdot on a PDA works great if you login with an account that has the display set to "light" display mode. With that mode turned on, even Pocket IE can render the pages correctly. And that's saying a LOT, too, because Pocket IE doesn't render most web sites correctly.