Mobile phone browser compatibility

[laguna92651]

What would be the approach to build a web site that would detect whether to display the site on a standard desktop browser, an ipad browser or a mobile phone browser. I am making the assumption that the browsers in question would fully follow web standards.

What would be the sizes of the pages in question. I would assume I would need to replicate the site for each form factor, much like a multi-language site? Couldn't find much on this when I did a site search.
Thanks

[gwpriester]

Since this post produced no responses, I suggest doing a bit of Google searching to see if you can come up with a script or other solution. I am sure this must exist. Everything exists. And everything is on Google. It is just a matter of digging it out.

[pauland]

It's not an easy question. It's easy to find out the form factors. The only real way to do it with Xara is using a javascript redirect to a seperate site or subsite as has been suggested. Browsers have an identification string that can reveal the device it's running on.

Outside the world of Xara, it would most likely be done with CSS style sheets that can adapt to the most appropriate CSS styling for the device. Such an approach is not viable with Xara sites.

As Gary suggests, Googling "javascript mobile redirect" will reveal answers. It has come up on TG before.

Here's a start: http://davidwalsh.name/detect-iphone

[khv4u]

re mobile phone browser compatability....

I had this issue on my phone where the bacground and pictures were fine but the text ran over the edge of the page into nowhere and also the fonts were different types on some computers even though it was the same font type right across the board. I managed to over come this by making all my text a "group". It shows lovely on both my phone and the other rogue computer screens.

I do have a question though..... I am about to launch my site and it occurred to me that given all the text sections are groups (and i am sure that i read somewhere that means they show as an "image")... does anyone know if this will affect how my site is ranked on search engines..i.e will the search engine see the grouped text as text or will it be overlooked thinking it is a picture ???? Anyone know the answer to this ??

[pauland]

I would suggest that you keep text as text and avoid Xara grouping them into graphics. If you use non-standard fonts, browsers will substitute them and give you an unexpected appearance.