Topic: Making pages work on PDAs and Cell Phones

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.