Clearly the biggest problem in trying to get both Desktop PCs and Mobile Devices to display web pages in a satisfactory way is the vastly different size of screen. There’s an excellent AListApart article on that, which describes the problem as follows:
Because their screens are small and the device may not always have a horizontal scrolling mechanism, overflow in the horizontal direction is a major problem on handhelds. In addition to letting content wrap into a single column, you need to make sure wide elements fit the narrow screen.
The solution which the article describes well is to use different CSS style sheets. You include both a style sheet for ‘screen‘ that applies to Desktop PCs and a style sheet for ‘handheld‘ that applies to Mobile Devices. It sounds fine in theory. However look at that first Hot Mobile News Item. Microsoft Mobile is touting the Dell Axim X51v. It looks absolutely magnificent. It has a Display Resolution of 640 x 480. It would be a shame with all that resolution to put everything in one column.
So we have a Mobile Device that shouldn’t really behave like a ‘handheld’. Has anyone got a solution for that?
Related: The One Web Principle
