Reply To: Best practice for Mobile development in WordPress

[nixnerd]

…which normally involves overuse of display:none;

Sooooo much of this! ++

FYI though dude, you may be branded a heretic by some for feeling this way. The way I see it… everything is true until it’s not. It might be time to radically think RWD and create compelling sites that maximize the capabilities of whatever device they’re on. I kind of feel like over-reliance on media queries has led us back down the path of glorified pamphlets.

I’ve been thinking about the same thing lately and was just talking to @traq about it, AKA “Thunderscore.” We decided that the best method would probably be to query the device for it’s window size and then request the proper markup/stylesheet via AJAX. The only question either of us had was about performance and how quickly this can be done. Now, I’m going to assume people have figured out a way to do it pretty damn quick because some of the benchmarks on dynamically serving up mobile-specific markup/styles are crazy.

Different template or different content?

Paulie, I think he means both. This approach to RWD involves many things… including but not limited to tailoring content to the device. This might involve the inclusion/exclusion of photos, etc. Also… there’s some content on a site that flat-out does not even apply to mobile users. So… 5EO gurus love this approach.

I read an article with benchmarks a while ago that recommended using photos as background images to a div, then putting that div in a parent div and setting the parent to display:none. Apparently almost all browsers know not to request the photo in this scenario. But… seems like your markup suffers and becomes less semantic. Not to mention… the intellectual overhead associated with these COMPLEX styling rules seems to go WAY beyond managing two simple site versions. Just my opinion.

@traq, what say you sir? How should this gentleman proceed?