posts/mobile.en.html

   1 <!-- subject: Mobile is the future -->
   2 <!-- date: 2015-03-17 01:42:26 -->
   3 <!-- categories: Site News, Techblog -->
   4
   5 <figure class=nw>
   6   <img src=/d/news-mobile.webp width=1000 height=200
   7        alt="Photo of a smashed mobile phone.">
   8   <figcaption>(photo by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/16426637175/">Cory Doctorow</a>)</figcaption>
   9 </figure>
  10
  11 <p>A few days ago I received an email from Google Wembaster Tools saying no more no less but: ‘Your webpage sucks on mobile devices!’ Or something. Now that I think of it, I could have been worded slightly differently. The gist was the same though.
  12
  13 <p>I never paid that much attention to how my site
  14   looks on phones and tables.  I’ve made sure it loaded and looked, but
  15   apart from that never spent much time on the issue.  I always
  16   thought optimising for a small screen would be a lengthy and painful process.
  17   How mistaken I was!
  18
  19 <p>In my defence, when I last looked at the problem, state of mobile browsers
  20   was different; now there are two things to do.  First, add
  21   a <code>viewport</code> meta tag, e.g.:
  22
  23 <pre>
  24 &lt;meta name=viewport
  25       content="width=<i>device-width</i>, initial-scale=1"&gt;</pre>
  26
  27 <p>and then <a href=https://alistapart.com/article/responsive-web-design/>use <code>min-width</code> or <code>max-width</code> CSS media
  28   queries</a>.  Admittedly the second part may take some time, but if
  29   your layout uses simple markup rather than being TABLE-based,
  30   reading the excellent article on A List Apart might turn out to be
  31   the most time consuming step.
  32
  33 <p>If you haven’t already, do take a look at whether your website
  34   looks reasonably well on small screens.  Apparently mobile is the
  35   future, or some such.
  36
  37 <p>The ‘bad’ news is that I’ve dropped endless scroll feature.  This is
  38   because in narrow layout the sidebar moves to the bottom and
  39   endless scrolling would make it unreachable since it would
  40   run away all the time.