Meta-tags for mobile – should they be used?

user_193112 0
Viewed 54627

Meta-tags "Viewport", "MobileOptimized" and "HandheldFriendly" can be used to provide appropriately formatted HTML-content to mobile devices. Are these tags good things? They seem pretty platform specific in many cases, and even when not platform specific (viewport), they seem to require device specific attributes in order to work properly.

Should they be used? Where and when is it appropriate to use them? Are there alternatives (without user-agent recognition)?

Note: I have been using CSS media queries to achieve mobile-support, but this requires some UAR in order to get optimize font size.

mobile-website html
2 Answers

The iPhone uses Safari as a browser. They have a developer page which gives you some information when to use the meta tag viewport:

For example, if your webpage is narrower than 980 pixels, then you should set the width of the viewport to fit your web content

It is used like this:

<META name="viewport" content="width = 650" />

<META name="viewport" content="width = device-width" />

<META name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no" />

Another article that might be interesting for you is A list Apart: "Put Your Content in My Pocket".

user_5627690
Related