Archive for November, 2007

You will see some advert­ising for Web Dir­ec­tions North around this blog, the reason is that one lucky per­son who pro­motes WDN08 on their site will win a free ticket to WDN08, accom­mod­a­tion and air­fares. See­ing I hope to go to SXSW this time, win­ning this is the only way I get to Van­couver next year.

OK I have done the com­mer­cial dis­clos­ure bit, so why am I inter­ested in going, well in addi­tion to the fun social­iz­ing bit, in the speaker lineup we have Jef­frey Zeld­man and Tara Hunt. I just want to see Zeld­man speak. Tara delivered a really inter­est­ing key­note presentation …

Oh what a lovely browser </sarcasm>. I admit I do use it for brows­ing the mobile web (i.e. site designed only for mobile browsers), it works well with those sites and I need one keypress less than Opera Mobile when paging through the mobile twit­ter site. How­ever, if required to visit a tra­di­tional web site on my phone, I will use Opera Mobile. IE mobile’s ren­der­ing of tra­di­tional web pages is com­ical enough to almost win me a Web­Jam (and I did not have to dance).

The fun really starts when you try to build a site that works in both tra­di­tional web browsers and mobile browsers. IE mobile applies both screen and hand­held stylesheets. Which can cause chaos. Even know­ing this is not enough, I you try to coun­ter­act the screen stylesheet by remov­ing styles in a hand­held stylesheet, you need to do it properly.