My first visit from a Palm Browser

I'm sure the view was not very nice

[too much information]

I just completed a redesign of a site, and after years of having the site ready for cell phones and PDAs I never had a single visit so I abandoned the support for those devices.

Well, Murphy's Law kicked in and within the first month of completing the site I have a hit from "PalmSource; Blazer 3.0" which is aparently 160x160 and my site is designed for 740x480. Oops

So how does everyone else handle this? Do you cloak for PDAs and mobile devices and just serve them a limited amount of information?

[tedster]

Hand held browsers will take a lot of liberties with the layout that the original mark-up dictates. You might be surprised at how well a page displays. They shrink image dimensions (so does IE6 sometimes in default it's configuration) shrink divs, trade out image links for alt or title text, etc.

The biggest issue, I've found, is that the visual order for the rendering of information make go a bit wonky.

What I do right now is check my templates in Opera small-screen mode and tweak anything that's just plain awful. Then I just let it fly, one source code for all.

[mrMister]

Why not have a look at Google's palm search and see how they've adapted their site for palm displays...

[google.com...]

[pixelkat]

To scale a desktop-sized web site for handhelds without having to build 2 separate sites, use pure css and strict xhtml. That way, you can use the media="handheld" specification. Everything scales. Images and everything. I kid you not. Define as much as you can in em space or percentages so everything scales.

I'm a passionate ipaq user and I cruise the web all the time. There are handheld-specific browsers or even plug-in tools that have mastered the art of arranging the furniture on the page to minimize or eliminate horizontal scrolling. Everything gets stacked.

Don't lose any sleep over trying to accommodate us handheld web users. Anyone looking for a visual web experience isn't going to get it on a screen that small. We're after information. Half the time I turn the images off and I'm a creative web designer. As long as you have secondary text-driven navigation or use alt or title tags and don't make me turn the images back on just to navigate your site AND as long as the text flows without a major horizontal scroll, I'm good to go.

Kat