Any tricks to load a 3rd-party web page into a narrower viewport?
Dan Wood
I've noticed that when you go to a "mobile" website -- one that is
simply formatted, designed for small screens and light network
activity -- it's almost unusable. The default viewport of 980 pixels
means that you get very tiny text and wide lines. Zooming in barely
helps, since you have to keep panning left and right to read the text.
Examples: http://bart.gov/textOnly/index.asp and http://barcamp.org/
iPhoneDevCamp
Really there needs to be some way to re-render this kind of page in a
narrower width. It would be very nice to force a narrower viewport
on that page.
Once or twice, strangely, I've managed to link to one of these
"mobile" pages and somehow the viewport came up as being narrow, and
the page was amazingly readable. How did I do it? I don't know! I
got the feeling that if the page that I came *from* had a viewport of
a certain setup, the page it linked to was rendered with a smaller
viewport.
If anybody can think of any tricks (perhaps with javascript,
bookmarklets, iframes, etc.) that you could use to open up a page in
a narrower viewport, that would be really cool.....
-- Dan
Christopher Allen
> Here's something for people to mull over this weekend....
>
> I've noticed that when you go to a "mobile" website -- one that is
> simply formatted, designed for small screens and light network
> activity -- it's almost unusable. The default viewport of 980 pixels
> means that you get very tiny text and wide lines. Zooming in barely
> helps, since you have to keep panning left and right to read the text.
>
> Examples: http://bart.gov/textOnly/index.asp and http://barcamp.org/
> iPhoneDevCamp
>
> Really there needs to be some way to re-render this kind of page in a
> narrower width. It would be very nice to force a narrower viewport
> on that page.
It should possible to create a bookmarklet to do this -- I've
challenged my table at iPhoneDevCamp to create one ;-)
> Once or twice, strangely, I've managed to link to one of these
> "mobile" pages and somehow the viewport came up as being narrow, and
> the page was amazingly readable. How did I do it? I don't know! I
> got the feeling that if the page that I came *from* had a viewport of
> a certain setup, the page it linked to was rendered with a smaller
> viewport.
Supposedly .mobi domains default to use a 320 width viewport. Could be
some others do the same.
> If anybody can think of any tricks (perhaps with javascript,
> bookmarklets, iframes, etc.) that you could use to open up a page in
> a narrower viewport, that would be really cool.....
On the list!
-- Christopher Allen
AwayBBL
you'd need to somehow reformat it on the fly. Not impossible, but it's
be better to tell their site managers to create an iphone friendly
version that triggers off the user-agent.
In the case of the BART site, the culprit is a table thats sized like
this "table border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" width="600"...
so that won't scale down to less than that (just poor coding if their
target was a mobile.
On Jul 6, 9:37 pm, "Christopher Allen" <Christoph...@iPhoneWebDev.com>
wrote:
> On 7/6/07, Dan Wood <d...@karelia.com> wrote:
>
> > Here's something for people to mull over this weekend....
>
> > I've noticed that when you go to a "mobile" website -- one that is
> > simply formatted, designed for small screens and light network
> > activity -- it's almost unusable. The default viewport of 980 pixels
> > means that you get very tiny text and wide lines. Zooming in barely
> > helps, since you have to keep panning left and right to read the text.
>
> > Examples: http://bart.gov/textOnly/index.aspandhttp://barcamp.org/