Retrofit Your Web Pages For Wireless Compatibility

An anonymous reader writes "You probably don't want to maintain Web and wireless versions of the same site or take on the overhead of Extensible Markup Language (XML) transformations. This article shows you a more practical approach to wireless compatibility. With some well-designed XHTML, a bit of CSS, and the media attribute, you can do wonders. Create more flexible, Mobile device ready, Web pages with XHTML and CSS."

Comments

Re:This makes me feel so old and so sad

[TheRaven64]

Why should you specify pixel dimensions on images? If you specify font sizes in points and image sizes in pixels then your web pages will look different at different screen resolutions. Scaling images is very easy - most graphics hardware (even 10-year old 2D only cards) can do bi-linear interpolation, and many newer ones can do bi-cubic interpolation, allowing very high quality scaling of images without using the CPU, so there's no reason not to expect a browser to be able to scale images (even in software it's hardly processor intensive, compared to decoding a PNG).

Re:This makes me feel so old and so sad

[Have Blue]

Safari (and possibly other OS X browsers) do what the GP is suggesting, and it looks good up to about 400%.

Re:Eh?

[kwalker]

Funny, considering the specs for XHTML and CSS 1 are only about 5-6 years old. And considering that IE still doesn't display some CSS correctly I seriously doubt that "competant developers" have been using it "for nearly 10 years" to "display on any media and any UA". Netscape 4 barely knows what CSS is, and 10 years ago, it was one of the top dogs. And I also find it funny that "javascript doesn't work cross-browser" but Google seems to be using it just fine. Seems to me that the main browsers (Mozilla-based and IE) handle the ECMA version of Javascript just fine, and once Apple gets some things taken care of in Safari, it'll work fine too.

I've actually been trying to do some of what TFA has been talking about, but even then I get stymied by buggy wireless browsers that crash if you have a "screen" stylesheet and a "handheld" stylesheet in the same document, or crash if you load more than 8k of text and images, or fail to load the page if you have more than one image. I wish it was as easy as TFA talks about.

Wireless device browser compatibility isn't easy.

[ramakant]

This is a great article from the standpoint that it gets people thinking about standards compliance and web pages that validate. However, if you actually want your web pages to be correctly renderable on many browsers, you need to be able to send different markup based on the target browser. This is particularly painful for mobile phone browsers, where the specs supported are all over the map. The phone/browser manufacturer may claim XHTML-MP 1.0 compliance, but only support a subset of the actual spec.
In order to make our site compatible with as many mobile phone browsers as possible (I work for 4INFO), we use the WURFL Wall JSP tag library. This matches the browser user-agent, against a database of known devices and capabilities, and renders the appropriate markup. Only after extending that library and updating its device database have wee been able to get our WAP site to render on most mobile phone browsers.

Accessibility is important for many reasons

[JehCt]

A great test of a web site tests is loading on a Blackberry. Sometimes I move blocks of code around and use absolute positioning so the good stuff renders first, to help reduce thumb pain. (/. has too many nav links at the top of the code, so you have to scroll a lot to see the stories.) Googlebot "sees" web pages much the same way as a Blackberry. Indeed, search optimization and accessibility have a lot in common.

I am not sure XHTML is the key to accessibility. XHTML allows tables, which are often misused to control layout. The code flow of a table is different from visual representation, causing loss of semantic information when the page is rendered on alternative browsers or spiders that don't assemble the table the same way.

These common SEO/accessibility strategies provide good results on mobile devices, even with HTML 4.01, and as an additional benefit, make it much easier to manage the site, and may help search visibility:

1. Fix all validation errors and warnings.
2. Replace Javascript menus, or provide alternate text menus wrapped in NOSCRIPT tags.
3. Add alternate plain HTML to any Flash OBJECTS.
4. Strip layout tables and replace with DIVs. Tables with tabular data are fine, but consider adding CAPTION, THEAD, TBODY and TFOOT for better control over appearance.
5. Rip out presentation attributes and replace with CSS formatting. This greatly reduces file size and simplifies the code reducing the potential for errors, speeding page loads, and saving Google some disk space.

Once the above process has been done, the resulting HTML 4.01 can be converted to XHTML with trivial easy.