Category Archives: Mobile Web Development

Meta Refresh a no-no for Mobile

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Update: The Tour of California mobile site that I rant about below  no longer uses the  annoying meta-refresh!  Thank you, to whoever is responsible. There’s a bit of html, a meta tag which you can add to a web page to cause the page to reload after a specified number of seconds. It looks like <meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”60″> Which means that every 60 seconds the page will reload itself. It even works on many mobile web browsers. In general meta … Continue reading →

The Mobile Technology Weblog: Mobile Edition

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Update: Creative-Weblogging has fixed most of the browser detection issues with their mobile sites making much of what I wrote below no longer true. Opera Mini and Netfront are now recognized as mobile devices. See Creative-Weblogging CEO Torsten’s comments. It sounds like he is committed to making the CW sites mobile friendly. If you have a mobile browser that’s not getting the mobile edition of one of the Creative-Weblogging sites please leave a comment and I’ll try to pass it … Continue reading →

New Mobile Web Development Resources

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A side effect of all the buzz about the mobile web lately is that there are a number of new tools and resources for mobile web developers out on the web. The W3C, the international web standards organization, has a new alpha quality Mobile Web Best Practices Checker. This checker is a tough grader, it seems almost impossible to find a site that passes with zero errors. I checked yeswap.mobi and the checker reported 2 errors. It didn’t like that … Continue reading →

Are You .Mobi Ready?

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dotMobi, the registrar for the new .mobi top level domain now has a developers page at dev.mobi with quite a few resources for mobile web developers. The page has both mobile and PC versions. There are forums, articles, howtos, links to various mobile emulators and to browser vendor’s developer sites and a brand new Mobile Ready Validator which is at mr.dev.mobi. Like the online validators I wrote about here, The MobiReady one checks your page for valid markup, but it … Continue reading →

Validation is Your Friend

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It constantly amazes me that so many mobile web sites fail validation. And it’s not just new sites, even some of the biggest names in the industry have mobile pages that have been failing for years when validated by the W3C’s online validator. Probably a third of all the sites I look at don’t validate. The most common problems are: “Naked” ampersands in text and URLs (XML based markup requires that all ampersands be represented by the appropriate html entity). … Continue reading →