Mobile Stylesheets
In an article on A List Apart ‘Return of the Mobile Stylesheet‘, Dominique Hazaël-Massieux starts by reviewing the ‘ideal’ approach to making a site mobile friendly:
Ideally, site authors would be able to meet the growing demand for a quality mobile experience without changing a line of code. But the reality is that a site designed specifically with mobility in mind will always provide a much better user experience to mobile users, even when they are equipped with the device du jour. It’s not merely a question of network costs and delays or memory and CPU limitations. Rather, the mobile experience merits its own design, as discussed in a growing body of literature, including the W3C’s very own Mobile Web Best Practices, released in July 2008 as a W3C Recommendation. The formula for a mobile experience provided by Little Springs Design sums up the goal nicely: mobilize, don’t miniaturize. Mobile users operate in a very different usage context than PC users, and providing them with an experience customized to their needs is likely to be the best service you can offer to them.
But then he goes on to describe “a first step toward mobile design that uses CSS to maximize interoperability across platforms” asserting that “by starting simple, you can provide a decent initial experience, solicit user feedback, and iterate toward a more mobile-friendly design.”
Shame - because the likelihood is that if you put all your effort into a CSS solution, which is sub-optimal (in my view) because devices still have to load bloated code, and you probably end up with compromises for bot mobile and ‘normal’ browsers amongst other reasons, you’re much less likely to make the bigger step of producing a version of the site optimised for the mobile experience.
Many platforms make it quite simple to do this - there are mobile modules and plugins I’ve seen (and used) for Wordpress, Drupal etc. - if you’ve got server side logic, and preferably some form of content management / delivery system going on, it should be not much more than switching to a simpler theme for your presentation when a mobile device is detected.
But then that’s easy for me to say, because I still haven’t done it in anger to any large extent (yet).
we run m.moblog.net for mobile devices. people have to choose to go there (ie, we don’t attempt detection on page load), but it’s nice to be able to offer both full-fat and lightweight versions of the site - there’s nothing to stop me using full-powered moblog on my phone if I want to zoom and pan and load lots of html and so on, and conversely, I can get a fast, light version of the site too. It all depends on where I am and how fast my connection is (2G,3G,Wifi) and how much time I have to kill.
Django has a Thing for “mobilising” content, which is OK for simple stuff, but obviously it’s better in the long run to just roll your own “mobile” output filters. It’s hardly rocket science, after all. Especially seeing as, for moblog at least, we have multiple output filters already - html and xml views are already happening into most of our data, it’s not that big a deal to add a stripped, lean-but-functional, m-html too.
mobile css is nice to work with though. support is so much more consistent than for desktop browsers - no more dirty hacks just to make IE6 work!
Comment by mat — January 7, 2009 @ 4:26 pm