Topic: Making pages work on PDAs and Cell Phones (Page 1 of 1)

I've been working hard on making my new site www.shootpool.info work on cell phones and PDA. My sony ericcson is my only web-enabled device that I can do testing with so if anyone else has some devices that they could test this site with that would be awesome! (but I digress)

When I first enter in the address into my phone, the site, (or rather I should sayt the content) downloads rather quickly. Using an unordered list for navigation also makes the site easy to navigate. All seems very well but then I noticed the page was still downloading ... and downloading ... and downloading (remeber this is a cell phone, I don't know what kinda bandwidth I get but I know it makes modems look fast) Then all of a sudden one my images finished downloading and was displayed! This is bad! I don't want cell phone users to be waisting precious bandwidth on these images, especially since most of them are just for presentational purposes in a fully graphical browser. I was going to ask if I could provide a cell phone only stylesheet where all images have display set to none, but then I thought that would be pretty silly since I'm almost positive cell phones havn't a clue what to do with CSS. For the same reason, using javascript and the DOM are out as well. I don't want to make seperate page for WAP devices, after all, thats what standards compliance is for right?! So what am I to do? How can I stop these images from getting sent to WAP devices without dirty hacks and non-valid code?

You can/must use the "handheld" medium in your stylesheets for PDAs and cell phones.

A List Apart: Pocket-Sized Design: Taking Your Website to the Small Screen
Making Small Devices Look Great

Very valuable links! I had already read the ALA one. However, My phone is a Sony Ericson T610 that is one generation too old to download opera, so I'm stuck with its proprietary browser, which doesn't seem to pay attention to the media=handheld css file

is there any way to detect the handheld platform and/or browsers from their UserAgent string ?
That's a bit dirty, but you should force the handheld stylesheet via a server side detection of the browser/platform.
Downloading a recent browsercap.ini file might be interresting to see if there's already been some work on the detection of handheld platforms/browsers..

I just checked out your site http://www.shootpool.com and it came up perfectly on my Nokia running NetFront 3 browser. But I was wondering where the information about pool was!

Doh!

Then I checked your actual site http://www.shootpool.info and it also displayed well in NetFront. No pictures but lots of information about pool

lol. I got the .info name because my host is letting me get 25 of 'em for free. I'll be updating it big time as soon as I figure out some javascript/CSS/Dom issues. Thanks for testing it!!!!

NP.

If your cell phone can handle it, I would recommend NetFront over Opera. It was smaller, less expensive and supports javascript and CSS.

I realize, of course, that my setup may not be the typical cellphone/browser setup but if you have specific issues you'd like me to check out, just let me know.