This response is heading into off-topic land, but here's what we've come up against. (And we also had some trouble coming up with more current "best-practices" information as well as data on current device stats.)
We've done a couple of mobile versions of sites recently, and what we found was that for mobile we actually wanted to emphasize different content than we did on the desktop version of the site. On a site for a large shopping complex, for the full version of the site, they have crammed a ton of information into the site. It's not bad, mind you, but the site contains a LOT of information. When we started looking at it with mobile in mind, we started stripping out a lot of that information. Someone sitting in front of a desktop machine or a laptop might browse through various information on the site, but when someone loads the site with a cell phone, we're assuming that most of the time they're after specific information...hours, location, contact info, maybe a check to see what sales, special offers or events a specific store at the center might have. I would be quite surprised to discover that many, if any, people ever pulled up the site on a phone just to learn more about the center itself, so some of that information is not on the mobile version, while the parts that are on the mobile version are given less focus. But the information about whether or not the dog park is open at the moment is stuck right smack into the opening screen along with the hours of operation, so they are very easy to find. Given that we only wanted to present half or two-thirds of the content that was on the full site on the mobile version, it seemed silly to try to accomplish that with just a different stylesheet. So we set up a separate mobile version of the site. What struck us as interesting was that the new focus on mobile felt a lot like what we were doing 10+ years ago when developing full websites, in regards to optimizing content and size, and stripping out fancy bells and whistles. :-) Not that we don't still think about those things, but our approach has definitely shifted in the last 10 years. It was kind of fun to step back and look at it all with fresh mobile eyes, and yet frustrating at the same time to find ourselves once again with a huge pile of devices/browsers that were all different sizes with a hugely vast range of functionality and support. And back to CSS, I was actually quite pleased to discover that the full website, even WITH the bells and whistles (and flash and js slideshows and some relatively heavy CSS lifting) displayed precisely as desired on some phones, with 100% functionality. Jeniffer Jeniffer Johnson OffLead Productions http://www.offlead.com Unleashed Blog http://unleashed.offlead.com ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [[email protected]] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
