Why do breakpoints like #media only screen and (max-device-width: 480px) work for iphones and other modern smart phones even though they have for example 2436-by-1125-pixel resolution?
When I am working with Dev Tools in Chrome, why does iPhone X show 812-by-375-pixel? What am I missing or misunderstanding here?
Thank you for the answers.
There are hardware pixels and software pixels. A hardware pixel is an individual dot of light in the display. A software pixel, also called a CSS pixel in the web world, is a unit of measurement.
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I might be completely off the mark, but here goes:
I tried testing my website with various modern phones and tablets... and the result is that my media queries never come into effect because these phone/tablet resolutions are too high.
Things like #media (max-width: 767px) { }, which I want to display for phones, never come into effect because of this resolution problem. Any ideas on how to solve this? This can't be an uncommon problem so I feel like I'm overlooking something.
Configured correctly, "retina" screens take the increased resolution into account when rendering web pages. I'd take a look at Bootstrap, purely as an example of how to setup your page to be fully responsive.
You'll find once you have this setup, it will work regardless of the actual physical resolution of the device. For example, the first iPhone to have a retina screen (iPhone 4, perhaps?) had a "width" of 320px, regardless of the fact that it's resolution was far higher than that.
I don't want landscape view to appear when a phone is rotated to landscape, only a tablet-sized device. I'm using em's for measurement but it's hard to pick a good cutoff. The Nexus 4 (for example) is 61.5em wide in landscape (an iPad is 1024 or 64 em) which is very wide but landscape view looks poor on that phone. Is there a good solution?
You may need to setup device specifics for each device resolution. I'm not aware of any specifics that determine if you are looking at one specific device. Some phones are much easier to detect (like iPhone 6+) since they have specific abnormal resolutions. I know the #media handheld is ignored on many devices so that doesn't help much but give it a shot.
http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/media-queries-for-standard-devices/
You can add an orientation for a deeper test as well. Something like
#media (min-width: 1024px) and (orientation: landscape)
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/#media
I'm having a problem with my media queries where I want to target phones, tablets or computers. the problem is that today some phones and tablets have a high screen resolution.
I can´t seem to find a proper combination to achieve this. Could you help me and post the queries that you guys use for your websites? I've been working on these for days, to no avail.
Should I use some JavaScript library for this?
UPDATE:
I found a very good jquery library that seems to be very reliable with today's devices. And even though it is not being developed anymore, I found that it successfully detected all the devices tested, regular phones and tablets, high ppi phones and tablets, and desktop or laptop computers.
Try it out, and see if it works for you too
Categorizr
There is no way to make everyone happy. For our upcoming responsive website we used a few breakpoints
768px
1024px
1280px
1920px - is our biggest, we cut off at this point
We have our server output classes on the body to detect classes (can be done with modernizr I think, never used it), for example, .iphone, android, .mobile, .phone, .tablet
So if you are using an iphone we would get
.iphone and .phone on the body tag
For some pages we also defined breakpoints at 320px and 480px
We use jquery for everything, just a warning, jquery runs fairly slow on Samsung tablets, man do we hate that device
Example of media query (we use LESS)
// normal styles
#media only screen and (max-width: #maxTabletWidth) {
// less than 1024px styles, yes I know 1280px is also tablet
}
#media only screen and (max-width: #maxPhoneWidth) {
// less than 768px styles
}
Good luck
Having built quite a few responsive websites, I find that instead of specifying 'x' width for a desktop monitor, 'y' width for a tablet, and 'z' width for a mobile; it's better to use breakpoints to ensure your site works across all browser sizes.
That said, a good site to look at if you're interested in various screen sizes is screensiz.es, where you can see popularity stats as well as their physical pixel widths.
Being device agnostic means that you won't have to readapt designs, and builds when Apple, or Samsung release their super thin, or super chunky devices.
A final suggestion to aid the functionality on the variety of devices would be to employ something like Modernizr to detect touch events.
Hope that helps.
I wonder if you are using the right tool for the job. Responsive design lets you stop trying to target specific devices or guess what the specifics of the next iPad / smartphone will be.
Set the break points to manage the layout of your design at different viewports and you are 90% done ;)
I am trying to get to grips with media queries for different devices. I have tried my new Sony Xperia Z mobile and displays in full scale site format due to the high resolution. How do I add a media query to re-size a grid and format like a standard mobiles scale? On the Xperia the font is also too small to read and needs to show bigger. Is this a problem for retina devices that act like full size monitor displays?
Xperia Z - resolution 1920 × 1080, PPI 443
How do I include media queries for such devices?
This code targets all devices with the same pixel ratio, which is actually what you need.
#media screen and (-webkit-device-pixel-ratio:3) {
body {font-size: 250%}
}
Here is a list of devices and their device-pixel-ratio:
https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1N_eJYR_topuk3xmrOeNhYEsST_LAJikGKKzOQ2o
Yes, it would be a problem for "retina devices that act like full size monitor displays." They would be violating CSS. But since -webkit-device-pixel-ratio works for you, it sounds like this is caused by something else.
You probably omitted this:
The viewport meta tag is used in modern "mobile" browsers. (iOS/Safari, Android/Chrome, Mobile Firefox, Opera). It lets developers say "this is a properly-designed website, not desktop-specific crud". Without it, the mobile browsers assume your website is designed with an unspecified min-width, somewhere around 960 pixels.
When I say "pixel", I mean "CSS pixel". We've established that your CSS pixels are 3 physical "device pixels" on a side. And this means the largest dimension on your device works out at 640 CSS pixels. This is much less 960, so "desktop" webpages - which are assumed in the absence of a viewport meta tag - will start off zoomed out.
`#media only screen and (max-device-width: 1920px) {
/* define mobile specific styles come here */
}
#media only screen and (max-device-width: 640px) {
/* define mobile specific styles come here FOR I PHONE RETENA DISPLAY*/
}`
When it comes to using media queries, I see max-width and max-device-width used a lot to target "small screen" devices, or smartphones, but why not use the media query for resolution?
For example, #media screen and (min-resolution: 230dpi) allows me to write CSS to target some smartphones, such as the Galaxy S Glide SGH I927R, which has 480 x 800 pixels, 4 inches (~233 ppi pixel density)
Conversely, I would have to use #media screen and (max-device-width: 480px) and (orientation: portrait) plus #media screen and (max-device-width: 800px) and (orientation: landscape).
It seems that min-resolution would save me some time. I have read several articles and blogs, but I do not see anyone advocating for resolution.
There must be an obvious point that I am missing - I am not a professional web designer - but what is "wrong" with the approach of using resolution? What makes width or device-width better to target "small screens."
My favorite site so far on width vs device-width has been:
http://www.javascriptkit.com/dhtmltutors/cssmediaqueries.shtml
Maybe the reason that I had to use a max-device-width of 800px, which seemed "excessive" for smartphones to me is because I did not use the meta tag viewport. I read in the article above on page 3 the following:
"It means that our CSS media queries will match the dimensions of the "zoomed out" device's, and not its actual (ie: 980px for device-width on the iPhone instead of 320px). So whenever you're optimizing a webpage for mobile devices, the first step is to define a particular META tag on your page to alter/ disable the "zoom in" behaviour of mobile browsers..."
Perhaps after defining the viewport, the max-device-width would make more sense than using Resolution in the media queries?
Chris Coyier with CSS-Tricks.com and Jamie Bicknell of Rentedsmile Web Design put together a great article on the CSS-Tricks website.
I will summarize their main points and post a link to the article at the bottom.
The most popular analytics software in the world is Google Analytics which is why most of us are so concerned about resolution. Unfortunately this does not account for browser window size which is the only item to account for when many of us are using 27" screens, multiple screens, 40+ devices, and frankly, what percentage of people ever use the full window? I know I don't.
Chris Coyier points out only ~61% of users view within 200px of full screen meaning if you are 'pixel-perfect' then in the eyes of your consumer -- you are not. Your website will most likely be broken. (An estimated 0.85% using full screen)
This means screen resolution is totally irrelevant to the cause which are our end-users.
See the full article here for their complete breakdown and illustration-rich analysis
http://css-tricks.com/screen-resolution-notequalto-browser-window/