Hello. Wish I had seen this group a year ago.
I have found usenet to be a rich source of timely free help, i hope
this post is no exception.

heh heh

blah blah...get the pleasantries out the way..

anybody know what is popular cell phone format for website?

I think people with cell phones are surfing the web more and more

right? well sure they are

my big thing is my recordings, I want to make mp3's available for
download from my website.

Thanks

MJ

Miami Jones wrote:

For older phones, WML, but I wouldn't bother with that these days.

Use XHTML 1.0; conform to XHTML 1.0 Appendix C; validate to XHTML 1.0
Basic <http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-basic/>, but avoid the following
elements:

caption,
table,
td,
th,
tr,
object,
param

Serve as "text/html".

Avoid images larger than about 150x100 pixels.

Only specify colours (foreground, background, borders), paddings, margins
and fonts in CSS. Don't try any positioning, floating and so forth.

Cookies should be OK. Javascript is a no-no (but validating to XHTML 1.0
Basic will prevent you from adding Javascript anyway).

I try to keep page sizes to under 4 kB, as mobiles tend to have very
limited memory. Leave out <meta> elements and other such rubbish -- they
just add to the bloat. Strip out comments.

That's what I do anyway.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact

Toby Inkster wrote:

sounds like a plan, Thank You!

I've got a little reading to do now. but looking forward to it.
Thanks again, if you visit my site and write me (if you're interested)
I will fwd you a link so you can download my newest release, it's
called
"A Change is Gonna Come"...

Thanks Again

Barry

barryparrish.com

Toby Inkster wrote:

i didn't know it was headed for obsolescence.

yup. for benefit of the OP, you can serve up alternative images though. you
throw a separate style sheet for hand held devices in, just make sure
something like this comes below your normal or "screen" stylesheet call in
code (some browsers pick the first sheet they find):
<link href="/styles/mobstyle.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
media="handheld" />

debatable, but you test on more platforms than anyone so you should know.
the mobile browsers seem to do their own job of interpreting what should go
where and in what size. and besides, there's that hand held style sheet
begging to be customized. and there's display:none; and that's a charm.
check my site on your hand held some time. OTOH, the best sites for mobile
seem almost completely unstyled, 100% width, just let everything dump out
serially and end up where it's put.

no raisins in mine if you please.

good point.

what?

and you still have time to hang out here.

trevor wrote:
It will probably be supported for many years to come, but any vaguely
recent mobile browser will support valid XHTML and usually HTML too.
(WAP is an XML, so XHTML was a trivial addition for mobile phone
programmers. HTML support is not quite as good, but almost.)

It can probably be done with a fair degree of success, but I don't have
the funds to invest in lots of mobile phones for testing; so I just avoid
it altogether.

Which is where colours and fonts can go. :-)

But then you've made the user pay to download content that they can't see.
Mobile users tend to pay for their downloads on a per-megabyte basis.

Mobile users tend to pay for their downloads on a per-megabyte basis.

Most of my experience in catering for mobile users is restricted to one
particular web site. I would post a link, but it's members-only, so you
wouldn't be able to sign in anyway.

At sign in, the user chooses which "edition" of the site they want to
view. (This is from a list of radio buttons -- the User-Agent string is
inspected to determine the best radio button to pre-select, so most mobile
users won't need to manually choose "Mobile Edition".)

Once they're signed in to the Mobile Edition, the content management
system takes care of all the stripping out of crud, cutting up into 4 kB
pages, etc. The whole thing is about 30 lines of PHP and only took a
couple of hours to put together and test.

The one thing that I preach but don't practice in the above site is the
use of XHTML 1.0, validating to XHTML 1.0 Basic. The site is written in
HTML 4.01 Strict (though it uses a custom DOCTYPE so I can make use of a
few extra elements -- e.g. U and NOBR), so that's what the mobile edition
uses. It's less than ideal, but it still seems to work well.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact

Toby Inkster wrote:

how about combining the two? writing XHTML into cards?

yeah, but if it's all window dressing, who cares? my handheld sheet just
omits all of the visual doodads, not content.

elitist.

ugh.

ugh.

well then so be it.