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Simetrical wrote:
On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 2:38 AM, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
Currently live I'm specifying the Chick skin's style as a handheld variant for MonoBook. This in theory will only be picked up by browsers which ignore the 'screen' style already
In practice this is *not* the case. As far as I'm aware, Opera's handheld variants will respect handheld stylesheets if present, and if not, they'll try to use screen stylesheets (with clever modifications to get them to work better).
That doesn't seem entirely accurate given my testing so far.
Note that Opera Mini, in its current version at least, has two distinct modes:
One mode (the default) uses the 'screen' media stylesheets and renders a large, zoomed-out page which can be zoomed into. (This is much like Safari on the iPhone.)
This mode totally ignores the 'handheld' style. (But it does appear to see CSS3 media queries for screen size, as the iPhone's Safari does. I'm not using these at present.)
The other mode (check "mobile view" in the settings) strips a lot of styles *and* seems to strip apart lots of floats and tables... *and* it sees the "handheld" style. In my quick testing it didn't seem to pay any attention to the "screen" style that I could see.
This is pretty much the same view as the "Small screen" option on Opera on the desktop.
I haven't tried Opera Mobile as I don't have a compatible device, but my impression is that the latest version behaves much as Opera Mini, but with native rendering on the client instead of a hybrid client-server system.
We used to have a handheld stylesheet, but someone from Opera asked us to either improve it or get rid of it, because it wasn't well-tested and ended up looking worse on Opera for handhelds than the screen stylesheet. (I deleted it.)
That's why I'm trying to make it actually work. :)
I'm using the existing 'Chick' skin's CSS since it's been around for a while, it actually works (though it's not ideal), and it can be easily tested -- plus the ability to explicitly test with &handheld=yes or &useskin=chick means humans can actually try the handheld style on their desktop browsers.
This is unlike the old handheld CSS which nobody could see or test. A quick look at it confused the hell out of me -- it seemed to be trying to mix in both screen and handheld stuff and duplicated lots of things. The new style is specific and minimal (and already in use!)
The same probably applies to at least some other handheld browsers that try to use screen stylesheets where available.
It might -- can you find some? We'll never know unless we actively work on it.
- -- brion