On 6 Feb 2012, at 05:58, Paul M Foster wrote: > This is sort of obliquely related to PHP. > > I don't have a smart phone, but I need to know a couple of things:
There are simulators available for most smartphones. > 1) Do smart phones use the same browsers as the desktop, or do they have > their own stripped down versions of browsers? The trend is certainly moving towards full desktop capability, but personally I still think that if you expect a significant amount of traffic from mobile devices then your site should adapt accordingly. > 2) When a browser broadcasts its header telling the server what kind of > browser is involved, do they broadcast anything in the header to > indicate that they're being run on a smart phone? Yes, but there's no standard at the moment so detection requires something similar to https://gist.github.com/1124666. That code is pretty old, and I can't remember where I got it, but at the time it worked really well. > 3) Bonus question: Is there a preferred method amongst coders to > determine what type of environment is being browsed from, so as to serve > up the proper type of page (desktop or smart phone version of a > webpage)? Generally speaking you're better off with a design that automatically adapts to the viewport on which it's being displayed. While there's more than one reason for this, the overriding reason is that the same software (i.e. the same user agent) could be running on any size of device, from watch to huge flat panel screen on a wall. I think the world needs to move on from "is it a mobile device or not" to accepting the reality which is that the browser / OS is irrelevant, and that the way your site renders should be purely based upon the size of the display. Responsive designs such as that described in the A List Apart article Mari posted are fantastic tools for achieving this goal. -Stuart -- Stuart Dallas 3ft9 Ltd http://3ft9.com/ -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
