On mobile, most of my client's website looks like the regular desktop page. It hasn't been made responsive, but it's being worked on. Since the body width is fixed at 1000px, it's all tiny text and stuff in your mobile browser. So that will be a double tap party to actually read the content.
So what is my question? I'm building a little notification bar for mobile. It's a little yellow bar that slides in from the bottom of a webpage, telling the user that the page they're viewing isn't optimized for mobile yet. Apart from the fact whether you'd actually want this, I'm trying to figure out how to make the fonts inside of the bar to have a consistent physical size on all devices. Problem is that all devices these days have a wide range of DPI. Another question I found on StackOverflow deals with this, but only treats the desktop case. Mobile is a whole different ballgame.
I've been meddling with mm in CSS, but the inconsistency in textrendering between browsers is beyond massive. I guess I could do it by calculating font-size in px based on pixel density. Or by writing a bunch of media queries for all DPI variations. But that all seems stupid. Am I overlooking something here? Is there an easier way to do this?
Use "em" as unit instead of mm or px. It adapts automatically to the font that the reader uses.
Example:
p {
font-size:1em;
}
Related
I've built flat page sites for years, largely with table architecture, and I know they must become more mobile compatible.
However, I actually WANT some of my non responsive sites to display in mobile screens as simply reduced-sized versions of themselves.
In an effort to understand the basics, I've created a simple page, no tables, one piece of art, and the meta tag which I understand is supposed to reduce a large size HTML page to fit within a mobile screen. But when I check this in a mobile screen emulator, my page is huge with just part of itself showing in the mobile screen. It's not reducing so that its full contents show within the screen.
What's the basic concept I'm missing?
http://ldihealtheconomist.com/html5-test-single-col.html
You're using a set width.
No matter what screen you're using, if you set the width as pixels then it will be displayed as that many pixels.
No offense, but if you've been making sites for years and don't know this, then maybe it's not the right thing for you...
Read up on #media queries, vw,vh and viewport widths.
Look at frameworks such as Bootstrap or Skeleton.
I am constructing a responsive website, and have designed it to look correct for desktop view.
I am currently tweaking it now for responsive breakpoints/media queries.
Here's the problem that I would like guidance on:
From my understanding, I've seen people only use width for their break points. In which case I did the same thing and make it look good on all the width break points.
However, I happened to be testing using the google chrome developer tool and started selecting specific devices (iphone 5, iphone 6, iphone 6 plus, ipad, etc.)
And noticed something alarming, which was that the elements was getting pushed off the screen vertically at the top and bottom because each of these devices not only have different widths, but HEIGHTS as well.
So the perfectionist in my is thinking about setting a media query for both height and width for every major device, but I realize that this work, although can be done, might not be the most efficient, and I have not seen other tutorials do this.
My specific question is: if there is a more efficient way to developing a responsive site without having elements go off the screen vertically.
Added information: I have a div that contains an img, then a h1 below it, then a bootstrap row with col-sm-6
The img width is in px (I experimented with vh/vw and %, but that seemed to make it more difficult to control when it scaled)
You can not set media query for device height, You can set height only,
And do not depend only in google chrome developer tool because sometimes it will not response in proper way, so you have to test in actual device for batter view.
I am trying to make my website resize on handheld divices but form some reason its not responding to the stylesheet.
If you take a look here: responsive design link and put www.sofiamillares.com as the site test, the top lines get cut off and everything looks super big.
Can some one please enlighten me on why is it doing that and what would be the easiest way to fix it?
This is happening because your design is not completely fluid.
Only your container div will adjust with the width (a bit)
To fix this quickly, you could
give your divs percentage widths, so they scale with the screen resolution
float your square boxes at the bottom, so they will stack on smaller screens
consider using media queries or some js device detection to target mobile devices and send them a modified css stylesheet.
Get some ideas here: http://mediaqueri.es/
As Jason suggests, creating a mobile specific version of your site is usually the best solution. You can then test the user-agent string for phrases like "android" and "iphone" and re-direct the user to your mobile site. There are libraries available for JavaScript as well as many server-side programming environments (PHP, ASPX, etc) which do all sorts of browser detection for you.
When building a mobile site, you'll of course want to make the page lightweight so it'll load quickly over a mobile data connection, and format it appropriately for a smaller screen in portrait orientation.
I'm trying to present my notecards in a web app style.
I'm not worried about caching, or making it work offline.
I just want it render well in the iOS browser.
Here's the link: http://kaninepete.com/flashcard/review.php?Sec=3
I want it to look the same as if you re-size your browser window to 320x480.
The problem is, it always renders a huge amount of blank space off to the side.
I want to lock the scrolling to only the vertical axis (like flipping through notecards),
but also have the text at a readable size.
You can use CSS media queries to set your template on a certain width/height model. This works well and can adjust specifically for iPhone screens.
As for the font size issue you'll probably need to just spend time testing. With that it's going to require some type of virtual simulator or a real iPhone where you can test the site. I just loaded it up onto my iPhone 4 and I see what you mean about additional space - this is just because of your page size. Try messing with CSS media queries I think you'll find the answer in there.
Here is a very handy Google search to hopefully get you started on the right track. CSS3 has a lot of new features. Many of them geared towards mobile :)
Reading your question again, here's some suggestions based on what I think you're looking for.
Make sure your document is valid HTML before you continue. Safari on iOS supports HTML 5, so I'd suggest targeting that, unless your platform targets something different already.
If you just want it to run well in iOS Safari, then code for that. If you want it to look similarly in other browsers, however, then it may be necessary to look at styles targeting the iOS device (via width/height). See http://davidbcalhoun.com/2010/using-mobile-specific-html-css-javascript (It seems hacky, but based on some research a week ago, this still seems to be the suggested route.)
You've got CSS that shouldn't be in there if you want to target multiple browsers. overflow:hidden and set pixel widths.
Generally, I'd say you'll want to tweak your markup as well. List items or headers would be much better than just simple breaks.
Maybe I'm just oversimplifying the question, but it looks to me like all you really need to do is wrap each notecard in a div, perhaps giving each div a <div class="notecard_wrapper">. then just attach a stylesheet that specifies the width and height you want for each card.
This page explains Safari's viewport and how to change it. It will probably fix the font size problem and maybe help with the page size.
Basically, Safari by default simulates a screen that's about 900px wide, when it's actually about 300px (so the page appears zoomed out). This makes pages designed for real computers render properly, but for a web app you usually don't want it to zoom the page at all. The viewport tag should let you control that.
px? em? pt? seems like with varying device sizes and densities it's getting to be time to use something absolute like pts. Can anyone point me to a good, recent write-up of what to use when?
(I'm specifically targeting webkit-based mobile devices as my primary platform, though the site needs to work on large monitors, as well. I'm fine ignoring IE and older browsers for the most part.)
Check out this and that from Luke Wroblewski. Googling his name will find more.
As you say with high density phones you should avoid px but also pt that originally was for printing. As you setup your site to comply with most browsers, mobile or not, set your body font-size using percentage (historically better support I say without source) and then use em through your document. This allow your users to set their preferred font-size in their (mobile phones) browser settings and let you keep your relations between your different font-sizes.
As a web developer, I stick to pixels because this is already a standard for all digital display devices. Most mobile phones now come in screens based on pixels, and phones are able to resize to fit your content.
You simply have to make sure that you minimize the amount of content on each page for fast loading and rendering.
I think that you are best designing multiple CSS style sheets for browser window sizes,
Aside from that the best method in my mind is percentages - that way the content is always relative to the screen it is being viewed on. And then use em for font-sizes which is similar in the way it works to the way percentage works for layout sizes.