Can I Rely on Automatic Mobile Adjustments for Responsive Design - android

I have a website that I am trying to design to be responsive on mobile. Without doing much responsive styling, I actually like the way it looks on mobile. I read that mobile phones automatically make certain adjustments to websites to make them more compatible with mobile devices. I am pretty certain that is what mobile devices are doing with my site.
My question is, if I am content with the way my site looks on mobile without doing much responsive design, is it not necessary to do any further design. Can I rely on the mobile phones to ensure my site is reponsive? If it is better to do all of my own responsive styling, how important is it that I add responsive styling immediately?
Note: I am referring to that way my site looks on mobile without the meta viewport tag. When I add that tag, the mobile adjustements go away and I encounter some issues with my own styling (but I have a whole other question devoted to that). Also, I am looking at my site primarily using my Samsung Galaxy S4 using the Google Chrome browser. I did do certain responsive styling, but not a ton.

If all you care about is what the design looks like on your mobile phone specifically then no, you wouldn't need to design any further.
However, you should take into consideration what it might look like for other users with different devices and device widths.
It is best practice to use the meta viewport tag to work across all devices and allow your site to be truly responsive.
Is your site mobile friendly? Try using Google's mobile friendly test: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
Google is updating their search algorithms to place a higher importance on a site being mobile friendly. If it is not your site will not rank as high in their search index. Read more about it here:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/02/finding-more-mobile-friendly-search.html

Related

How to detect and solve Android's lack of CSS 3D perspective support?

I'm trying to build a website using the technique described in this article: pure CSS parallax.
This technique requires browsers to support 3D transforms (and specifically perspective/preserve 3d).
It's working on the majority of devices and browsers no problem, and where it doesn't it is easy to detect if it'll break (such as lack of transform-style: preserve-3d in IE, or lack of 3d transforms at all) and fix it accordingly.
However, one browser stands out in exceptionally f*******g me over when I try and make it compatible to any degree - Android stock browser. Versions of the browser on Android 4+ support css3d transforms but are completely incapable of rendering them properly, with the big bug being that -webkit-perspective: 1px, while technically supported has absolutely no effect in this case (transform: translateZ(xpx) elements).
As far as I see it I have two options:
Detect the Android stock browser and serve CSS accordingly
Detect perspective not to be working and serve CSS accordingly (unlikely)
I've yet to find a foolproof/futureproof, elegant way of detecting the Android browser on the back end with PHP, with the only options being hefty API's and what I consider to be lacklustre abuse of mobile detection libraries.
I have absolutely no idea how I'd go about doing no.2.
Any help appreciated

HTML troubles in standard Email app on Android tablet

I use HTML coding in email marketing.
Nowadays It is important to nice represent email offers both in standard and mobile version.
So, exist the certain tricks which help you to made your emails looks nice on mobile devices (without bugs and gaps).
For example, the most famous trouble is the tearing of content of email letter due to changing of text size by mobile device.
To ban this feature of device I use next css-trick:
#media only screen and (max-width: 480px) {
body {
-webkit-text-size-adjust:none;
}
This trick works fine if I check my email in mobile device browser.
But it is not work if I check it in standart app for viewing emails.
For example here are the screenshots made from Android Tablet PC in standart "E-mail" app (version 4.1):
You can see, that the content is torn because of the incorrect text size.
How to avoid it?
Firstly, using media queries is not 100% supported in all email clients (Gmail for example). Fortunately, this doesn't need to be in a media query.
A webkit specific declaration will only work in webkit based clients (mac for example). See the htmlboilerplate (line 35), you could also add the ms prefix:
-webkit-text-size-adjust:100%; -ms-text-size-adjust:100%;
I doubt this will address your Android tablet however. This may be something unavoidable, unless adding !important to your font-size can do the trick.

What do I need to know to make my website work on mobile devices nowadays?

This question is based on What do I need to know to make my website work on mobile browsers? which was posted in 2009 with some old websites and specific Microsoft stuff
I make web-apps mostly in Django and it doesn't seem to work very well in Android/Iphone/other mobile devices.
There are some apps like django-mobile (https://github.com/gregmuellegger/django-mobile) that offers you the possiblity of making different sites depending on the flavor of the device. The problem is that we almost have to make 3 websites if we want to use it in Android, Iphone and PCs.
There are some W3C recommendations (http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/CR-mobile-bp-20060627/) from 2006, with I think is obsolete because 6 years made the internet and the devices completelly different.
Any contributions concerning that?
As far as I know (correct me if im wrong) Django is a Python framework, so it runs server-side. That should not effect anything running on the phone. All smart phones will be able to run HTML/CSS and JavaScript/jQuery.
If you are talking about how the page is displayed on such a small screen there are several options:
Have a responsive design that adapts to the device's screen size. Have a look at Bootstrap.
Have a separate mobile site and something that will detect a mobile/tablet device and forward it to the mobile site running on a subdomain like mobile.mysite.com.
Have a non-responsive site and use the viewport meta tag.
Another option is to use css media queries, which allow you to set conditional css depending on the screen or browser dimensions like this :
#media only screen
and (min-width : 325px)
and (max-width : 500px) {
/*CONDITION CSS*/
}
The nice thing about media queries is that you can get really detailed in theory you could have a media queries for 100's of devices specifying specific css for both the devices landscape and portrait mode.
Here's quite an interesting article about the Romney versus Obamas campaign and how each party has chosen to develop their mobile sites differently.

Which browser specific CSS3 necessary for mobile website

As we develop our mobile version website, I am wondering how many of the browser specific CSS3 versions are necessary. The plan is for only smaller handheld devices to be sent to the mobile version, iPad, Galaxy and other tablets will stay on the main website.
In particular I am wondering about box-shadow, border-radius and gradient css support.
I have been combing the wonderful world of google and come up with the list below, of which browser specific versions might be necessary to cover the bulk of smart phones.
-webkit- for box-shadow
-webkit- for border-radius
-webkit-, -o-, -moz- for gradient
Can anyone confirm my list? Or tell me which ones I didn't list might be necessary?
Thanks
I suggest you use css3please.com to get all the possible prefixes for most of the commonly used css3 features.
As for mobile; you will not need the IE prefixes (opera has mobile browsers etc.)
Don't forget to always specify a non-prefixed version, regardless of if its already supported by some browsers, because it will be in the future, and the prefixed versions will go ignored.
To look up more specific information about property support in different browsers you could look them up on caniuse.com

make a website compatible with android

How can I make a website(which is exist before) compatible with android?
So that we can use every functionality of that website on our android device.
Have a look at this link: http://developer.android.com/guide/webapps/targeting.html. The same rules would apply for making a website. One of the most important things is adding this line:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />
This tells the browser to set the zoom level according to the device width. Otherwise the site will be zoomed out a lot and the user will have to zoom in to see the text properly.
Almost all of your website's functionality will work in the Android browser unless you have some really screwed up Javascript code.
Have a different stylesheet for the mobile browser.
Keep lower resolution graphics as bandwidth is a huge issue on phones. An EDGE network is too slow and even 3G speeds vary a lot.
Do not keep the pages too long. Display sections as Accordion menus which will expand/contract when the user clicks on the headers.
Do not keep drop down menus which are activated on mouse hover. There is no hover state on the phone.
This article from SmashingMagazine has a couple of other tips.
have a look at WebView here. I did this with an Internal site of mine. Basically I scaled it down in size and graphics. Depending on the amount of content it could be easy or more difficult.
rewrite/modify it to be compatible with mobile browsers. Its not something that you can just add a stylesheet for.
Android's webbrowser, at least for recent versions of Android, is quite powerful, and quite close, in terms of features, to a desktop one.
So, if your website doesn't do any too-fancy / special stuff (like super-recent HTML5), it should work quite well on an Android device.
Note, though, that if you want your website to work on a mobile device, you'll have to at least think about :
The fact that 3G (or worse) network is slow (bandwith is not great ; and ping is not good either) ; don't make your pages too heavy.
The screen is small : don't put too much data on it
Using touch-screens with big (compared to the screen's size) is hard and not precise : use big links, don't have links too close to each other.

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