mobile

Viewport units have always been controversial and some of that is because of how mobile browsers have made things more complicated by having their own opinions about how to implement them.

Case in point: should the scrollbar be taken into account for the vw unit? What about a site's navigation or page controls — should those count in the calculation? Then there are physical attributes of the devices themselves (hello, notch!) that can't be overlooked.

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A month ago I explored the importance of relying on Interaction Media Features to identify the user's ability to hover over elements or to detect the accuracy of their pointing device, meaning a fine pointer like a mouse or a coarse one like a finger.

But it goes beyond the input devices or the ability to hover; the screen refresh rate, the color of the screen, or the orientation. Making assumptions about these factors based on the width of the viewport is not reliable and can lead to a broken interface.

I'll take you on a journey through the land of Media Query Level 4 and explore the opportunities that the W3C CSS WG has drafted to help us deal with all the device fruit salad madness.

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Say you've designed an HTML email with 3 columns. Because of limited and weird CSS support in email clients, email design is done with tables. That 3 column design looks great on large-ish screens, but it squishes awkwardly on small screens. Theoretically a media query would save us here, but as we can't even count on floats we sure can't count on those. There is still a way though.

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Tabs are a simple design pattern in which a row of links are obviously clickable navigation and when a link is clicked, new content is shown. There are loads of variations of course, but it's one of the most ubiquitous navigation design patterns out there. When arranged in a horizontal row, it is also one of the least small-screen-friendly design patterns out there.

We can make it work though.

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A reader wrote in with this question:

We know that slide out menus are good for mobile (Facebook, Gmail, etc) But do you think they are appropriate for desktop web applications?

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Ben Terrill shares some things you can do to improve the experience for your visitors using tablet devices.

Between 2008 and 2013, people's opinion on where the majority of responsibility in mobile design lies has shifted.

In this first time ever in CSS-Tricks history, we're going to re-run the same poll we've ran in the past. Now, more than five years after the original poll, we're going to ask: (more…)