11 Other browsers

Does any one have any thoughts about supporting other handheld browsers, especially ones with limited or buggy CSS, as well as ones that don’t understand media=“handheld”? Zeldman commented on this: http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0203c.shtml#pocket

I’m specifically thinking of Pocket PC IE 2003, but I know many other handhelds have problems as well: http://www.macedition.com/cb/resources/handheldbrowsercsssupport.html

posted at 08:29 am on September 1, 2004 by Dan

12 Great article... but...

…sadly most handheld devices I come across don’t support the handheld media.

That is… most phones, and some pda’s.

However, ignoring the practicalities for a moment – great tips, and good advice, hopefully the technology will catch up with the standards some day.

posted at 09:49 am on September 1, 2004 by darkcryst

13 handheld media type test

I’ve just started working with a handheld barcode gun. I found it doesn’t recognize the handheld media type.

Here is a handy link to test your pda:
http://www.htmldog.com/test/handheld.html

posted at 02:21 pm on September 1, 2004 by Damon Cool

14 No style sheets?

Does anyone know if there’s a way of serving up an unstyled version of a site to handheld devices? It seems to me that if a site is semantically coded, it should look and work just fine without ANY style sheet at all.

posted at 02:32 pm on September 1, 2004 by Dan

15 Pocket IE and CSS

“I believe that Microsoft is doing just what you proposed with PocketIE on the PocketPC.”

Vinnie,

If you declare your screen CSS as @media screen{), it will not be rendered by the PPC. If there is no media declared, Pocket IE will attempt to render it. Or so has been my experience.

posted at 02:43 pm on September 1, 2004 by Kim Siever

16 Great!

Good article, in my opinion the most worth-while ALA article of late!

posted at 04:32 pm on September 1, 2004 by James Denny

17 Nice demo, but what about the rest?

The page with the handheld stylesheet is a nice demo and looks great on my PPC, but why isn’t the rest of ALA using this stylesheet as well? I have to put up with Pocket IE’s vain attempts to ‘fit to screen’ a site that simply isn’t designed for it.

Guess I’ll continue reading ALA on my desktop for a while yet.

posted at 09:24 pm on September 1, 2004 by David

18 very useful

Thanks for including a sample CSS file, which gives a lot of clues. A very useful pointer to start working on a handheld stylesheet.

Can anyone confirm that the iPaq emulator pointed at in one of the previous comments is indeed an emulator that is close to what happens on an iPaq?

posted at 12:13 am on September 2, 2004 by Martijn ten Napel

19 hand held emulators

It would be good if there were more emulators or others ways to see how a site design would look on a handheld when you don’t have one to test against.

There was one handheld emulator available before which turned out to give inaccurate renderings, i’m not sure if that’s the same one mentioned above. Maybe browsercam.com can add handheld devices to their website preview tool.

posted at 07:29 am on September 2, 2004 by Tom

20 CSS Validator broken for handheld media

Like the article a lot!

However, I’d like to warn everyone that the W3 CSS validator currently has a bug that causes it to claim all your CSS intended for handheld media (as indicated by the media attribute in the <link> tag or @media in the CSS) is invalid when it is in fact valid.

They seem to be aware of the bug:
http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=392

Hopefully it will get fixed soon. Until then don’t panic! :)

Btw, I’ve got a Nokia 6600 (a Symbian Series 60 phone) and it’s built-in Series60 browser seems to find and use handheld stylesheets correctly. However it seems to omit any background images that you specify. Hope that info is of use to y’all.

posted at 08:14 am on September 2, 2004 by James