Chilligavva

In an ideal web world, all websites should display the same in any media or device.. (screen, printer, mobile, speech synthesiser etc. etc.)  This actually helps a lot of readers recieve the website in a manner that is correct for them.  What do I mean?  The sight impaired can either recieve a site in a braille friendly manner or listen to the site read out to them  in an audio format. (text to speech.).

For a very normal reader, you would ensure that the page is not too graphic intense when you print it. (do away with unnecessary embellishments and make use of more black ink and white, so that printer resources are not used up..) If you know your readers are more of the Mobile variety, you would ensure that the site is formatted to show up well in a 2in by 3in size, which is a standard mobile screen.

Now, once you start writing your CSS, it gets to be pretty cumbersome, and most site authors therefore end-up designing a site for "screen", which is a computer screen, and then cross their fingers and pray that it shows up well in all other media (mobile, print etc.).  Why so?  Its pretty exhausting to make sure your code is consistent across atleast the major browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera). 

This is when I really wish that all the browser manufacturers agree on making sure that their browsers show sites in the same way, without the GUI programmers tweaking code, needlessly.. But at this point, as in the case of  many people coming together, its less of technology and more of politics..

Here is what the W3 folks have to say on styling for different media..

One of the most important features of style sheets is that they specify how a document is to be presented on different media: on the screen, on paper, with a speech synthesizer, with a braille device, etc.

Certain CSS properties are only designed for certain media (e.g., the ‘cue-before’ property for aural user agents). On occasion, however, style sheets for different media types may share a property, but require different values for that property. For example, the ‘font-size’ property is useful both for screen and print media. However, the two media are different enough to require different values for the common property; a document will typically need a larger font on a computer screen than on paper. Experience also shows that sans-serif fonts are easier to read on screen, while fonts with serifs are easier to read on paper. For these reasons, it is necessary to express that a style sheet — or a section of a style sheet — applies to certain media types.

Quoted from the chapter "Media Types CSS standards " at  W3.org

The good news for Wordpress sites is that Contentrobot.com developed a wordpress plugin to display your site on the iphone.  I grabbed the code and implemented it on the 13th of October.  I noticed that it was around since July 2004.  Better late than never is my view on this.  Five minutes of my time, is all it took. And voila, Chilligavva showed up nicely, in blue on the iphone.  I would recommend this as a must-use wordpress plug-in, so that you can reach out to your users better..

• Grab the plug-in here..
• Read all about it here.

How will the i-phone enabled site work?  read the FAQ from the plugin site..

Will it Work on My WordPress blog?

The current version (v0.1.2) has been tested with WordPress 2.2.1

Feature List

• Formats your blog content for optimized viewing on the iPhone and iPod touch.
• Automatically detects the iPhone/iPod touch’s Safari browser and only displays the custom theme to iPhone and iPod touch visitors, other visitors get your standard theme.
• Simple iPhone/iPod-like theme with common interface elements that compliments the iPhone/iPod touch’s internal applications.
• Images larger then 300 pixels wide are automatically scaled down to fit the iPhone/iPod touch optimized width.

Requirements

• WordPress 2.2.1

• An iPhone or iPod touch (for viewing)