Slashdot Mirror
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."
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).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
... And so it comes to this.
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.