I am looking for your views on an issue I am having with a design for a new website at work. I am a fan of elastic design (which you might of noticed if you are reading this via my blog). The original intention was to have a basic design for the smaller (< [...]
The site of the Western Australian Premier is one of the alarming number of websites that are built just for broadband users, while ignoring those on dialup or those on expensive mobile broadband networks. The home page in question weighs in at over hefty 750kb. Which is fine for business and home users with decent broadband, but not everybody has access to fast and cheap broadband in Western Australia.
I am not just talking about outback Western Australia …
The W3C are running a free online training in Mobile Web Best Practices, you can find out more on the course overview page or you can head straight over to the registration page. You might need to rush seeing the course is limited to 100 participants.
Update 1720WST 5 May 2008 , just got informed by W3C the course is now full, the 100 places where filled quicker than they expected.
Hat tip to Scenario Girl. See you on the course Lisa.
Gary wrote a post entitled Forget Select - it is Browse, Browse, Browse in which he was surprised by the results of a usability test involving a select list, or more specifically users ignoring the select.
I was not surprised by the results of Gary’s test, and for a long time have only used select [...]
As Edward O’Connor pointed out in a comment on my previous post there is an ISO standard for HTML, ISO/IEC 15445:2000, the details can been viewed via the University of Dublin, Trinity College, Department of Computer Science site.
I was fortunate enough to spend an afternoon with Molly on her world tour to the edge of nowhere. We had lunch in a restaurant overlooking the Swan River and talked. Took a ferry over the river and sat in a cafe/restaurant, talked including me trying to explain WA’s archaic licensing laws as we drank coffee, if we bought a meal it could of been beer . Before catching the ferry back, wandering the street of Perth, seeing some bronze kangaroos before finding a pub for a beer and even more conversation.
We discussed a wide range of topics, a couple of which need to reach a wider audience.
Ben wrote X-UA-Compatible: let sleeping intranets lie?, which was post I wanted to write about browser version switching because is all about intranets and their applications and nothing about the internet. So after writing a long reply on Ben’s blog, I decided to expand/express my views here.
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.
Olav Bjørkøy has created Blueprint a CSS framework which has received a lot of attention is the blogsphere in the past couple of days…
Writing my previous post on the button element and mobile browsers got me thinking about HTML5 and how it will work with mobile web browsers.
I know all the major browser vendors (Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and Apple) are onboard with HTML5, and they are also the major mobile browsers vendors (well Opera, Microsoft and Apple via its’ webkit being used by Nokia are), but will HTML5 be they implemented for mobile web browsers and how?