Design for PDA access?

External Since: Nov 03, 2003 Posts: 4

I was just asked by a client to create a website that would be used for
both "typical" users as well as PDA users (probably Treo 600) for
wireless access. Two questions:

- Is there a reference somewhere on the web that will help me learn the
specs for hand-held units and how to design mini-pages that are
optimized for the small display? Fortunately, this will be an
"intranet" type of application so the potential user community's
hardware will be known.

- Using PHP, what's the best way to test for the user's browser and then
display the appropriately formatted page?

Thanks!

--
Al Link

External Since: Apr 25, 2004 Posts: 91

*Al Link* wrote:
> I was just asked by a client to create a website that would be used
> for both "typical" users as well as PDA users (probably Treo 600) for
> wireless access. Two questions:
>
> - Is there a reference somewhere on the web that will help me learn
> the specs for hand-held units and how to design mini-pages that are
> optimized for the small display? Fortunately, this will be an
> "intranet" type of application so the potential user community's
> hardware will be known.

Sorry, no links to hand, but if I were tasked with this I'd probably
write the site as if it were to be used by a screen reader. In other
words it would have meaningful document structure, sensible use of
headings, lists etc and would present it solely with CSS, no
presentational tables. The CSS would not use absolute positioning or any
absolute measurements. Graphics would mainly be restricted to background
images in the CSS - if I decided to use any. I'd initially aim to just
build one application and accommodate different browsers solely through
CSS (see below). The idea here being to write one application only to
save time, costs and ease future maintenance. However, there is a caveat
on having very good CSS experience to do it.

> - Using PHP, what's the best way to test for the user's browser and
> then display the appropriately formatted page?

From a quick search around I notice that the Treo 600 uses the
Handspring Blazer web browser and that apparently supports CSS 2. So
rather than doing any browser sniffing you could write your site so that
it includes a 'handheld' media type
(http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/media.html#media-types). However, I don't
know anything about that particular browser and how well it handles
media types.

If media-type support isn't that good then by all means browser sniff
(you're in a controlled environment so this is more reliable) but sniff
to decide on whether or not to serve the 'handheld' CSS sheet or the
'screen, projection, etc.' sheet, rather than sniffing to decide whether
to send the user to the 'normal' site application or to the second
'small screen' site application, IYSWIM.

An alternative would be to add a presentation layer between your site
data and the browser. E.g. if the site's data was XML you could use
different XSLT sheets to transform it into different HTML formats.
However, that is a kind of last resort IMHO. The worst solution would be
to write 2 applications and push the user to the appropriate one via
browser sniffing.
--
Andrew Urquhart
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