Support for Mobile/PDA Web Browsers

College of Engineering -- University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Support for Mobile/PDF Web Browsers

Viewing webpages on the College of Engineering website with handheld devices

Web browser applications used for mobile and personal digital assistant (PDA) devices might render webpages differently from applications used for notebook and desktop computers:

Cascading style sheets and in-line styles might not be supported on mobile web browsers. Pages should be readable with or without their associated cascading style sheets.

Minimum screen width is 128 pixels for some models. Other common screen widths: 160 and 240 pixels. Apple iPhones use a screen width of 320 pixels and a viewport of 980 pixes to scale down to 320. Web developers can control the width of the viewport by using a style in a cascading style sheet (CSS) file.

For optimal performance and best display, make images at 100% of the size you want them to appear.

Opening a new window with the target="_blank" option for the tag is not supported. Apple iPhones block popups and cannot render Flash.

JavaScript might not be supported in some devices.

On some devices, conventional HTML and XHTML webpages are displayed by dividing the page vertically into thirds and rendering one column at a time. This method allows conventional webpages to display well on mobile and PDA devices without using a specialized format.

Resources

Excellent articles:

Put Your Content in My Pocket, Part I

Put Your Content in My Pocket, Part II

Developing Web Applications for the iPhone

World Wide Web Consortium, Mobile Web Initiative

Making Small Devices Look Great (advice from Opera)

Handheld Stylesheets (Emerging XHTML/CSS and Waning WAP)

Etemad, E. & Newth, J. D. (2004, August 31). Pocket-sized design: Taking your website to the small screen. A List Apart 187. Retrieved September 20, 2004 from http://www.alistapart.com/articles/pocket/

The End-All Guide to Small-Screen Web-Dev by Heidi Pollock.
Pollock's article is best used in conjunction with two other Webmonkey articles about web standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium: “Streamlining with Web Standards” by Greg Penhaligon and “Web Standards for Hard Times” by Paul Boutin.

Websites:

Google's open handheld operating system:
Android — An Open Handset Alliance Project
[contributed by JM]

Emulators for developers:

Openwave Developer Network Phone Simulator
[found by NH]

PalmOS Web Browser 2.0 developer information
http://www.palmos.com/dev/tech/webbrowser/

Avantgo developer information
http://www.ianywhere.com/avantgo/developer/channel_developer/createcontent15.html#975986

Windows CE (Microsoft Pocket PC) developer information
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnppc2k/html/ppc_dev.asp

World Wide Web Consortium Guidelines:

http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-html40-mobile/#Guidelines
http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-html40-mobile/