Sent by Wildranger222222 on 19 October 2004 09:09
>Hi all,
hope this isn't out of scope, both on css-d and wsg:
>On the template I'm working on, I decided it would be cool to give it a pda
friendly version, for the target public would be kind of eager for new
technologies.
Following the ALA article on taking your site into the smaller screen, with
some adaptation to my font options previous definitions, I created a second
style sheet to be called under Handheld devices and to overwrite any normal
css rule.
>I assume it is correct to inserte it like this:
----------------------------
Interesting problem.....I found the same issue when I built my first mobile
web site this summer. Dont worry, its not you....its another case of very poor
vendor support for standards!
Yes, you have touched on a subject that is nice little bug, which allot of
css people will soon be screaming about....and the alistapart.com article
failed to address completely. Ive been testing on some mobile devices using the
so-called "standard". This usually involves either rebuilding your site as a
simple XHTML-basic doctype site with attached style sheet, which uses clean
simplified html structure of your original site, or even better, linking that
with media="handheld" sheet from the desktop versions or screen version of
your site. Do that and your are done and ready to view on a PDA. Right? wrong!!!
Well......there is a huge mess coming our way folks with mobile device
design and PDA's. It seems that not only are there many implementations (depending
on what country you are in) of an smaller "html" standard (ie chtml,
xhtml-basic, wap, etc,.) but that as well, many vendors have taken it upon
themselves to try and make attempts at displaying ANY WEB SITE they come across, even
if they use media="screen". In other words, whats happening is what happend
to me...your PDA probably read the desktop browser style sheet and ignored the
handheld sheet. You are then asking, what happened to my handheld sheet?
Guess what...most mobile devices dont support it! Seem as though developers at
these companies still dont know how to read and research web standards. Its why
two of the most popular pieces of softare, Internet Explorer and Visual
Studio are so horrible with front end code.
So whats happening is many mobile agents or "micro-browsers" are making
attempts to tap into the "natural" web presence, by supporting the wrong set of
style sheets, but allowing you to see any site under the sun in its native
format, including your screen-based style sheet, which is wrong. Whats worse, is
your wireless proxy of your carrier is also filtering those sheets, as well,
based on who knows which rules. The only solution I found was a bit of code
below that will allow you to actually go out and test, device by device, what
your PDA or other mobile device or browser supports as far as style sheet
linking. You will probably need to build a tiny style sheet for each of the 8
forms of linking, and if you are lucky, your device uses one of the "handheld"
flavors. My phone and its micro-browser strangely only supports one of the
"screen" import style sheet rules, which is about as bad as it gets!
screen
<link media="screen"... not applied.
<style media="screen"... not applied.
@import url("whatever.css") screen; not applied.
@media screen {... not applied.
handheld
<link media="handheld"... not applied.
<style media="handheld"... not applied.
@import url("whatever.css") handheld; not applied.
@media handheld {... not applied.
My recommendation, at this moment in time, is that allot of devices are
trying to equip themselves to tap into any web page. It would be ideal for you to
simply attach a handheld sheet and knock that out. Unfortunately, you will
have problems, so I recommend you go back and just design a smaller
"XHTML-BASIC" doctype layout version of that site using that simplified html code base
in the basic subset of xhtml. Go to the w3c and read about it. Almost all the
new devices will display that. The world is changing fast and wi-fi city
wide and even country-wide, and even free, is coming fast, so I predict this is
a temporary setback. I actually think there is a fairly good chance that a
large number of mobile devices out there will never support handheld sheets
ever, because they will be fast enough and have the screen resolution to support
most screen version anyway. Im hoping thats not the case as far as supporting
the handheld sheets, as that is a very cool feature. So even the smallest
devices will need you to build micro-versions of your site until the handheld
sheets are supported and theses developers start designing better agents.
Thats my advice. :o)
Mitchell
_www.stormdetector.com_ (http://www.stormdetector.com)
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