I'm practicing with some responsive design basics and one question that a lot of tutorials don't answer explicitly is what minimum width to take into account when targeting mobile devices.
What I've seen most so far is #media only screen and (max-width:480px){...} for smartphones and then #media only screen and (min-width:481px) and (max-width:768px){...} for tablets. And so on.
I think the smallest screens that are used on a (reasonably) regular basis are 320px by 480px. However, the 320px width does not have to be taken into account due to the option of using landscape orientation. Right?
In other words, is it reasonable to assume that I'll always have at least 480px of width for a design? How do others handle this?
The Exact and ideal answer would be 320px.
Related
I'm creating a responsive design web page, and I want to ensure I do all the media queries correctly for different devices and orientations.
This post suggests try using min-width and min-height media queries. And set up different break points for different resolutions.
screen orientation for multiple tablets with fluid design
Although, I found this method with the orientation (see below).
Should I use this approach or the one above?
Should I use #media screen, or should I consider all vs screen?
#media screen and (min-width: 700px) and (orientation: landscape) { ... }
Screen orientation is an interesting one as it's not always something that's reported back by the device/browser, so it's less reliable to use than min-width/max-width.
The other thing is that unless you're trying to do a particularly funky thing when the device is in landscape, then just adjusting your design based on width breakpoints is usually enough to get your desired effect.
If you have a landscape device, then it's probably okay to let the design display as it would at portrait with the same horizontal space. That is to say, it wouldn't be an unexpected behaviour for the user.
As for media all vs screen, I usually just stick with screen, as should the user want to do something like print the page, I don't necessarily want my break points to interfere in that.
As with anything though, you should think about the most common use cases for your users and make your decisions based on that. If it's just a regular web app/page, then there is nothing wrong at all with using just screen and not worrying about orientation.
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/
I wrote some CSS code to make an HTML page fit better in mobile browsers. To be sure that my CSS apply only on mobiles, I use to following media query :
#media only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)
As an iPhone developer, I tested on this device and it works really well. But I want my CSS to be use on all kind of devices (Android, Windows Phone, etc).
What would be a good resolution that would fit most of smartphone of these days? Or do I need a more complex media query?
Recently I started to work with Responsive Web Design and Media Queries, I didn't find a unique "magic" query, but after reading a lot of articles and a couple of books, I've adopted the Mobile First way to develop web pages, and I'm using some common Media Queries, here the breakpoints:
320 px Mobile portrait
480 px Mobile landscape
600 px Small tablet
768 px Tablet portrait
1024 px Tablet landscape/Netbook
1280 px & greater — Desktop
(Taken from http://fluidbaselinegrid.com/)
Hope it helps
Updated: Mars 2016
Projects are all different, so it's hard to set a global rule that will fit them all. If you're looking for one, here's an example that someone smarter than me came up with and that I've used before:
xsmall: (max-width: 479px),
small: (max-width: 599px),
medium: (max-width: 767px),
large: (max-width: 1024px),
largeOnly: (min-width: 768px) and (max-width: 1024px),
xxl: (min-width: 1200px),
tall: (min-height: 780px),
Note the lack of references to devices, screen sizes or orientation on their names. The size of a 'tablet portrait' shouldn't really matter to us as we should try to make things responsive and look good on any screen size, not simply adaptive to a few screen sizes.
Yes, it's important to know the most common screen sizes and avoid crazy media queries, but in the end, your design may start to beg for adjustments at 530px instead of 480px or something like that. So why not?
Now, on my personal preferences: I keep media queries in mind all the time, but at first I tend to ignore device sizes almost completely. I also prefer the desktop-first approach cause I find it easier to adjust layouts to smaller sizes (ie.: removing not so important things from the page, reducing sizes, etc.).
Original Answer
Some people tend to ignore device sizes completely. They say you should check where your layout starts to break and create media queries only when necessary. Others will check for different device sizes, as you're doing now. But then you'll have a media query for 320px, another for 480px, and so on... You may go crazy with that, and maybe it's not even necessary depending on your layout!
So, for now I'm trying to do both. I tend to ignore device sizes at first and will create some media queries only when necessary (when layout breaks), until it looks good for sizes like 960px and bigger, and also for smaller screen sizes, like 320px (the smallest device size I care about).
I've been using min-width: 600px as my breakpoint in my CSS media queries. My rationale was that at 600px and above I'd capture tablet devices (Kindle Fire, iPad, etc) and below 600px would capture all of phone devices.
It turns out that while the iPhone plays nice by doubling its pixels, but still reporting being 320px x 480px, there are a ton of Android phones out there with resolutions like 700px x 1280px. The trouble is, how do I capture these devices without giving them a tablet-like interface?
Normally I'd just let the content respond to the pixel resolution of the device, however, a 1280px layout on a 4.3in screen just doesn't look right, especially since my application deals with a lot of form elements, which on a phone you want to span the entire width, but on a tablet or desktop you do not.
One good option is to tailor your media queries to your content, not arbitrary device pixel sizes, by using ems.
Please use responsive css framework to avoid this kind of problem. I would suggest using Foundation or Twitter Bootstrap
Will the following media queries behave exactly same on mobile devices and computers or there's any difference?
#media only screen and (max-width: 480px),
screen and (max-device-width: 480px){
...
}
and
#media (max-width: 480px) {
..
}
No, they will not. This is because device-width is not the same as width. If your media query has just width they'll behave the same, but when you introduce device-width you'll get different results. Refer to my response to this question for more info: CSS stylesheet that targets iPhone iPad not working
Media Queries themselves will behave the same. But when they query different things, they're likely to get different answers.
"only screen" usually works, but a small number of mobile devices classify themselves as 'handheld' rather than 'screen'. (My personal inclination is "only all" is better, partly because it includes handheld and partly because it provides the same CSS to print and presentation [i.e. projectors] too.)
For a first approximation, min/max-width is the logical current window (which may have been set by the user), while min/max-device-width is the physical screen. But many mobile devices will not return what you read in their sales specs for screen size. Many of them include a concept of a "viewport" ...something you can modify (with <meta name="viewport" content="...), but which usually defaults to something much larger than the actual screen dimensions. Thoroughly understanding the "viewport" will clarify (and possibly answer too) your query.
Also since mobile devices are often viewed at a much closer distance, they need much denser pixels in order to provide an equivalent user experience. (The iPad's "retina" display exemplifies the trend.) As a result of the very high pixel density, small physical dimensions can have notably large pixel dimensions anyway. (My own inclination is to think you'll ultimately have to take density into account in your Media Queries in order to produce really sensible results.)
In any case, for an alternative to Media Queries that keeps the concept but implements it rather differently, you might want to look at http://www.ckollars.org/alternative-to-media-queries.html