Re: MWABP: Revised text for Device Capability Detection.

On Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:52:30 +0200, Adam Connors <adamconnors@google.com>  
wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 12:16 PM, Bruce Lawson <brucel@opera.com> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:53:57 +0100, Adam Connors  
>> <adamconnors@google.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>  Great. Bullet-point added... Would somebody more familiar with the
>>> technology be able to supply a short summary please.
>>>
>>
>> How about: CSS  provides a mechanism called media queries
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/ whereby developers can provide
>> stylerules depending on certain attributes of the device such as
>> device-width, aspect ratio, number of colours supported. This can reflow
>> content, provide different fonts or differently-sized backgroud images,  
>> or hide images etc.
>
> Thanks. Added.

More to the point, this calls into question the strength of "prefer server  
side techniques". While it is clear that those are more powerful, and can  
reduce the amount of content sent to the client, they are more complicated  
and are not necessarily available. It depends on how much adaptation you  
are doing, which in turn will depend on the nature of the content. As a  
simple example, almost all of my slidesets in the last 4 years have had a  
mobile version - this is about 3 lines of CSS in the top, plus the  
practice of pushing other stuff out so it doesn't get loaded for mobile.  
That is far simpler than having to set up a server-side detection,  
achieves what is necessary (my slides tend to be pretty simple content),  
and means anyone can pass them around at will without having to pass any  
server-side code to go with them.

For the moment I will just flag the question - I am not sure how much it  
is worth changing the basics we have. But I think we should look at some  
kind of wordsmithing to clarify the point a bit...

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals       Try Opera: http://www.opera.com

Received on Saturday, 20 June 2009 17:45:46 UTC