CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iphonehtmlsmartphone
Colen
Colen

Reputation: 13918

Web page restrictions for use on iphone / smartphones

I want to allow our main application to generate document files that can be easily read on the iphone, or other smart phones. The easiest way to do this, I think, is to create a simple HTML file and use javascript to show / hide different bits of it. For example, when the user clicks / touches "section 1", the section expands to show its full details; otherwise, it will remain collapsed to save space.

What guidelines should I follow when creating this file? I've done a little research and arrived at the following:

These are useful for deciding how to style and arrange the HTML output, for example. Are there any other useful guidelines to work with? For example:

1) How big / small should I make things to let the user have a large enough 'target area'?

2) How can I get the file onto the iphone? Would the user have to drag and drop it via USB?

3) What size of fonts can I use before it gets too small to read?

etc etc. I don't actually have an iphone to test on, which makes this a little more problematic.

Thanks for your help!

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1280

Answers (4)

VirtuosiMedia
VirtuosiMedia

Reputation: 53386

I'm not sure how current this is, but Yahoo says that one of the restrictions for an iPhone is that it won't cache files larger that 25k uncompressed. This doesn't affect your display necessarily, but it could affect your performance and so you may want to take it into consideration for your design.

Upvotes: 0

Genericrich
Genericrich

Reputation: 4651

Most mobile browsers render XHTML-MP (XHTML Mobile Profile). You can get away with rendering that.

iPhones (and other WebKit phones like Android) support the viewport meta tags which can make the experience more tailored to that phone screen size. You can learn about these in the iPhone web page creation docs from Apple.

If you are really interested in supporting a wide range of handsets, you should look at a "multi-serving" technology like WURFL, which will let you abstract a lot of the complexity away from supporting hundreds of handsets. It's sort of yesterday's technology though, since modern mobile browsers render most web pages just fine.

Upvotes: 0

codeclash
codeclash

Reputation: 2063

If you're going to provide your documents through ASP.NET you might want to check this out: http://mdbf.codeplex.com/. It allows you to detect what kind of smartphone did the request, you can then check out the capabilities (screen-resolution, color-display, screen-pixels height... etc.)

Upvotes: 0

Mark Bessey
Mark Bessey

Reputation: 19782

I don't know about other smart phones, but the only way your file is going to get onto the iPhone is via the web browser, email, or a custom application that you write. There is no general mechanism for uploading files to the iPhone.

It's surprisingly easy to read even fairly small text on the iPhone, and the gesture-based zooming makes it very easy to zoom in and out.

Upvotes: 3

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