handheld Media Type, RIP?
Published on Jun 30, 2009, filed under development, css. (Share this post, e.g., on Mastodon.)
This and 133 other posts are also available as a well-behaved ebook: On Web Development.
Website authors don’t use handheld as it’s barely supported; mobile browser vendors don’t support handheld because it’s barely used.
This is kind of the situation I think we’re facing—please prove me otherwise—, and it’s a problem. CSS’s handheld media type would be valuable to tailor content and services to mobile devices. The catch-22 we’re dealing with instead means two things:
Media types, with the exception of
print, could become useless. (That’s not including media features, however.)We may come to depend on user agents so smart (think content scaling) and connections so fast and affordable that site owners don’t have to offer alternative, mobile-optimized access to their services.
The CSS Working Group may disagree with my thinking but I like the idea that vendors meet consumer needs to make the second point a reality: providing us with smart software and reasonable prices to avoid a mess caused by… yes, who.
About Me
I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m an engineering lead, guerrilla philosopher, and indie publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead and manager at various companies (e.g., Google); I’m an active web and tool developer (code optimization, digital defense), a contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and a book author (O’Reilly, dxsrc). You’ll like my work if you value principled, pragmatic problem-solving. Let’s connect.