There are an awful lot of pages on my web site, and I've been busy making them all mobile-friendly . Most of them are little or no problem making them look good on all platforms, but there are three that are especially problematic.
I jumped this hurdle (well, sort of stumbled past it) by making two of each of the pages with a link to the mobile page from the index.
Ideally, I could just check to see if it was a phone or not and redirect phones to the mobile page, but there's no way to make this 100% successful. Each brand of phone has a different user agent, and there are a lot of phone browsers you can install. On top of that, is it an Android phone or an Android tablet? With the minimum typeface size and viewport set, those pages are fine on the PC version but the phone version looks like crap.
Apple should have thought of this when they made the first iPhone, and Google should have thought of this when developing Android. The answer is simple, but it can only be implemented by browser makers and perhaps the W3C.
From the beginning of the World Wide Web, browsers looked for index.html, the default front page in any directory. This worked fine before smart phones, but no longer.
Phone browsers should look first for mobile.html, and if it exists display that, and display index.html if it isn't there. Tablets and computers would behave as they always have.
It doesn't have to be mobile.html, it could be any name as long as everyone agreed that it was the standard, like they did with index.html.
Maintaining a web site would be much easier if they did this. What do you guys think?
Thursday May 14, 2015
I finally did find find workarounds for the three pages that need a mobile-only version. At first I just had a link at the top of the page, but this morning did a little googling and found a very short javascript program, about four lines long, that looks at the browser s screen resolution. This won t work if the phone s javascript is shut off, and I ve only tested it on my own phone, so I need to leave the links in.
Saturday March 12, 2016