Viewing with a Pocket PC (Page 1 of 2)

Without a screenshot I wouldn't have a clue. I have no idea about how handhelds render PunBB.

Here are seven screenshots. (If you're on dialup, they're pretty big. )

EDIT: The Board Footer text isn't visible on the desktop.

EDIT: The text in the weird box isn't visible on the desktop, either.

Thanks.

No. That was actually my Pocket PC. I used MagicSS to do the screenshots.

Unrelated, I viewed these forums on my cell phone (its browser supports forms), and it skipped the report/delete/edit/quote and subscribe, post reply, and quick post. I wonder why?

What is this fetish with alternative user agents all about. Is there anything on the web so important that you can't wait until you get home to look at it.

Yes, I think so.

Sometimes, you're away from home and you just need to check up on someting.

Actually it is quite simple to get it to work. All you have to do is come up with a stylesheet which is more like a print stylesheet i.e. no floats and no absolute positioning, just let everything flow down the page and display menus vertically instead of horizontally. The drawback is that viewers would have to choose one stylesheet for viewing on a PC and another one for viewing on a handheld. I think the response headers indicate screen width so you can probably use php to sniff for that and deliver a narrow stylesheet automaticially. If you really wanted to go to town on it then you would have  lighter version of all the pages which would get served to handhelds. In PunBB's case that would be problematic because of the absence of templates.

None of this applies to those lucky enough to have the Opera browser installed on their handheld device.

Hey Paul

The PDA stylesheet is the easy part, getting the same markup to display "portal style" in all browsers, is the tricky part!

I got'er goin from 1column to 4column in all browsers back to IE5 now....finally!

P.S. All CSS1 & no positioning

Despite my somewhat flippant previous repsonse, this is actually a serious subject. I might not think much of the idea of viewing web pages on mobile phones but it is the next big thing. It might also be, as in Greg's case, the thing which really triggers the move to web standards.

I'm tempted to have a go at a mobile stylesheet for PunBB since it should be fairly easy. For example, viewtopic only displays in two columns because there is a float. Take away the float and the user information moves above the post. Take away all of the user information apart from their name, kill avatars/smilies/signatures/ and you have a perfectly good format for a PDA. What a PDA would do with the scrolling boxes I have no idea.

The only fly in the ointment I suppose are data tables, a tableless design is naturally more suited to a narrow format.

Fromt the point of view of implementation. I think the way to do it would be to sniff the user agent size and then, if narrow, serve a special stylesheet instead of the normal stylesheets. I dont think there is any need to give users of PDA's a choice of colour schemes etc provided what they get works.

I agree on a PHP sniffer of some sort & that fancy colors aren't needed.
Its pretty tricky stuff, you have very limited CSS support & no .js support usually either.

I have Pun partially converted (viewtopic) I haven't converted the index or viewforum tables yet. I have a 2column float figured out to replace the tables, they look great the way they are though.
I have a few more important things to get working first, unrelated to this.

I think I mentioned before, that I have a new CSS site to launch asap.
Someone pack v1.3 in a .zip & I'll launch it today! We can make a handheld/screen TPL for PUN, a community project. I have OrganicCSS.com ready & waiting!

Theres a lot of meaning & answers to problems in that site name too. Basically, "Approach elements of design, according to their natural behaviour"

cheers

There could be unknown vulnerabiltites, but here I zipped it.