mobile-friendly : Java Glossary

Google has decided that every web page no the net has to be resigned for the convenience of cellphones and other computers with tiny screens. If you don’t comply, they threaten not to carry your site on google.

I think Google is being paternalistic. The marketplace should push those changes where needed.

Google’s Demands

Some of the things they insist on:

• The text must be big enough to read without the user adjusting it. When CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) was designed they defined font sizes by pixels. As display got finer and finer resolution, the size of a legible type got smaller and smaller. It should have been designed in terms of the size of the smallent legible font, or something equivalent. Providing multipliers should be the responsibility of the cell-phone, not the webserver.
• It must have a mobile viewport which looks something like this:

  <meta name="viewport" content="width=500, initial-scale=1">

• Content may not be wider than the cellphone screen. This is ridiculous. What kind of table can fit on a cellphone screen. Cellphones can scroll. Let them scroll. A desktop screen is ten times wider than a cellphone screen. Why should it be limited in any way because some people buy toy screens?
• You may not use Java or other plug-ins, even if you display alternate text when they are not available. This is really high handed.
• Links must not be too close together. This stupid. Links are not decorative. They are semantic.

Fixing

I gather the usual way to handle this is to determine what sort of device the client has, then send them a different set of style sheets, but the same text. To do that you have at least modify the header you send, something impossible with a vanilla HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) server.

It should work with the server sending thesame multiple links to each client, one for each spreadsheet version, and have the cellphone decide which one it wants. Perhaps it does work that way.

Google suggests three methods of coming into compliance:

• Responsive web design

  Serves the same HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) code on the same URL (Uniform Resource Locator) regardless of the users’ device (desktop, tablet, mobile, non-visual browser), but can render the display differently (i.e., respond) based on the screen size. Responsive design is Google’s recommended design pattern. (Presumably serves different CSS).

• Dynamic serving

  Uses the same URL regardless of device, but generates a different version of HTML for different device types based on what the server knows about the user’s browser.

• Separate URLs (Uniform Resource Locators)

  Serves different code to each device, and on separate URLs. This configuration tries to detect the users’ device, then redirects to the appropriate page using HTTP redirects along with the Vary HTTP header.