Targeting Small Screens
Doug Bowman brings forward some ideas on Targeting Small Screens. It’s an interesting discussion that is made necessary by handheld manufacturers not supporting the handheld media type.
At this stage in the adoption of handheld devices for browsing the web, I’m not so sure it’s a good idea to introduce workarounds instead of pushing manufacturers of handheld browsers to support the handheld media type.
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Roger Johansson is a Swedish web professional specialising in web standards, accessibility, and usability. More about me and this site.
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Comments
Yeah, I do find it pretty irritating that, in this day and age, with all the pain we went through before desktop browsers got their act together, some handheld browsers are mucking everything up yet again.
I'm slightly less worried at the moment as I believe the number of people using them is small enough (and the mobile device upgrade cycle quick enough) to allow us to get it right within the next couple of years. But oh, what I'd give to gave Opera be as dominant in mobile browsing as IE is in desktop browsing. Then I could test mobile sites on my computer just by hitting Shift-F11!
I reckon handheld stylesheets not being supported isn't a major worry yet, really. Once people start getting into using the web in a bigger way on mobile devices, consumer demand will force them to improve their technology.
What does worry me is that speech-based technology still isn't using the correct style sheets when they're specified, and not sending the correct headers. Given how obsessive people have become with accessibility, I'm still surprised that the makers of screenreaders are still getting away without making products that identify themselves and obey the specifications put in place to help them ...
I'm still surprised that screen readers are so expensive. I think Apple are going to be integrating their speech technology into Safari a little more. It'd be nice. And hardly rocket science, surely.
Apple's VoiceOver, coming in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) looks very interesting.
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