[I-mobile-u] Couple of Questions

[Justin Anderson]

Media queries are good when style is the only difference between desktop and mobile versions of a site, but there is a variety of reasons why we prefer server side detection at MIT, all of which boil down to minimizing bandwidth.

We use jQuery all over MIT but not in our mobile sites. We use smaller image resources as well, which isn't easy with CSS when the images are content and not style. And then we also have a much more focused feature set on our mobile sites, so full desktop content would contain unnecessary data.

Also there is information that cannot be discerned from CSS media queries, like whether or not a device supports certificates.

That said, media queries are a nice feature and definitely have their uses.

Justin Anderson
Project Lead - Mobile Computing
MIT IS&T

On Aug 12, 2010, at 11:25 AM, Ahrens, Mark C wrote:

First, will there be a call tomorrow?

Second, has anyone experimented with using media queries to display a mobile site instead of some sort of device detection?  In my testing, it seems useful when you want a single URL with the same content on both desktop and mobile browsers, but I am curious if anyone else has any experience with it. Here is a page with an example of the media queries: http://css-tricks.com/css-media-queries/

--Mark

Mark Ahrens

ITS Web Technology Services
2800 University Capitol Centre
319.335.5061
mark-ahrens at uiowa.edu<mailto:mark-ahrens at uiowa.edu>

<ATT00001..c>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/i-mobile-u/attachments/20100812/47fec265/attachment.htm