
See your site like the rest of the world does. On the Nokia X2-01 - gulbrandr
http://generatedcontent.org/post/31441135779/mobileweb-row
======
notatoad
>If you care about... ensuring the content you create is accessible to all

why should i care that the content i create is accessible to all? The content
on my website would have no relevance to somebody browsing in africa or asia.
Furthermore, despite the fact that small-screen phones with web browsers
exist, that doesn't mean that people actually use them to browse the web. I'm
not going to waste time and energy targeting a browser that there's
approximately 0.00001% of somebody actually viewing my site with. and it's not
like the prevalence of 100px-wide screens is increasing.

~~~
instakill
Of course people use them, what a fucking stupid thing to say.

~~~
grey-area
Please try to keep your responses civil and add value; if you disagree, why
not tell us why (for example point to some stats for mobile browser usage)?

~~~
dools
Stats on browser usage are in the original article ...

------
zachalexander
_If you care about keeping the World in WWW, and ensuring the content you
create is accessible to all, then it will be a reality for you as well. ... If
you publish information on the Web, I can’t encourage you enough to try design
your site with these devices in mind._

The idealist in me (especially circa 2004 when I had Wikipedia-mania) wants to
agree.

It depends on what the goals of a site are. Is it Wikipedia? Yes, it should
absolutely look good on 128x160 screens.

Is it a business? Well, then it depends on who your customers are. If your
customers are worldwide and from a diversity of economic circumstances, yes,
design for the small screen. But if you can reasonably assume that most of
your customers use desktops, laptops, high-end smartphones, or tablets, then I
don't think it needs to be high on your list of priorities.

~~~
buro9
If you really want to make your content available in Africa, make it
accessible via SMS.

~~~
zachalexander
Yes, taking it even further!

And I find that discussion totally exciting, for websites where it's relevant.
I just think it's silly to make this kind of thing (postage stamp screens or
SMS availability) a norm for every website in existence ever.

~~~
buro9
It doesn't work for everything sure, but content is content and a web site is
merely one possible interface. As soon as that sinks in, if the format fits it
isn't so weird to think of how other interfaces can be used for the same
content. SMS could work really well for wikipedia... a paid interface to
obtain an article for a given query for example.

------
joahua
Love this article. As someone who builds mobile websites for a news
organization (not the BBC, but prominent in my country) the prospect of
properly assessing a website in terms of its global accessiblity is daunting
but incredibly exciting.

The 'why should I care' question is writ large in a community of people
obsessed with growth and efficiency — but, as much as I appreciate those
aspects of HN's culture, assessing site performance on low quality devices
provides a great opportunity to reach for the 'universal access' the web
promises.

------
dm8
But it won't be like that in 2015. Android is already dominating in developing
world. Low-end devices powered by Android is the future. In India for example,
maid at my friend's house didn't have mobile phone till 2007. Now she has
mobile phone but she wants to buy "smart phone" with few thousand rupees
(equivalent of 100 odd USD) and saving money for it. When my friend told me
about it, I was stunned.

In the hindsight, it looks like Android was masterstroke from Google. It wiped
out MSFT from OS market for handheld devices.

~~~
zachalexander
Funny how history seems to be repeating itself. Seems like Mac OS vs. Windows
all over again, on phones.

To go down that tangent for a minute -- I've been wanting to bounce these
thoughts of HN for awhile.

I always heard people argue (when I was a wee lad) that Apple not licensing
their OS freely like Microsoft did was a terrible mistake, as proven by their
rapidly diminishing market share.

You could argue that, well, they're doing better now, but I wonder if this is
a short term aberration. Their recent success seems to have been propelled by
their innovation in the mobile space (much as their early desktop success was
propelled by... their innovation in the desktop space), but I wonder if
history will repeat itself: Apple does well at first, until competitors
roughly catch up in terms of features, for cheaper, and with a more thriving
market of third-party apps, and more and more people switch to the new
platform and Apple's marketshare shrinks.

I'm sure many people have made this observation before, and have much more
insight into the situation than I do.

~~~
logn
It's not a fair comparison and never was. Apple makes appliances: the hardware
and software. When they let hardware clones into the market they cannibalize
their business. Power Computing made great Mac machines and much cheaper than
Apple. But Apple didn't want to be outsold on hardware and be reduced to only
a software company (like Microsoft). You're right: Google is now the Microsoft
in this scenario, the software company (although they're moving into hardware
now but we'll see how that goes).

------
dendory
It's more than just the lowest end browsers tho. Just take something that's
low powered, a couple of years old, and right away you can start seeing sites
that slow down. Just on my iPad 1 any time I load a heavily dynamic site
nowadays it seems like they load slower and slower. I feel like many sites are
becoming bloated just like software did in the 90s.

------
metalruler
You could also argue that designing for the average phone may be holding
others back.

My Nokia N900 has a screen 800px wide, supports CSS, can display inline
images, execute flash, execute javascript. Yet a lot of the time I get
redirected to the "m." version of a site, with bland default-font single-color
text, perhaps an image or two thrown in if I'm lucky. I would guess the
majority of the sites have just copy/pasted a list of mobile user-agents and
use that to decide when to redirect to the mobile version. It's a pity that
there's no simple way for the phone itself to tell the site what it is capable
of rendering.

------
baklava
This is probably well-intentioned, but a load of crap.

People in third-world countries don't care about the average U.S. site, and if
they did, they would find someone with a computer that probably is 5-7 years
old, possibly older, therefore they wouldn't be using that resolution.

What will be important, if you do care about them, is speed of load. Unless
you are using GWT or other server-side user-agent sniffing to determine what
to produce, then unless you have a mobile version of the site that the user
probably won't use, then they will more likely than not be _slowed down_ by
your CSS3 and Javascript crap, that is- if you really give a shit.

Trying to provide usable news sites, etc. in the remote chance that you are
the BBC is one thing, but 99.999999% of the time no one will care that your
site looks good on a Nokia X2-01 and similar. They probably will care if it
uses Flash and they can't view it on an iPad, or if it uses Java, or if it
renders poorly, is hard to navigate, or is just too slow.

Most shouldn't obsess over low resolutions like that, and shouldn't use GWT or
other methods of server-side user-agent sniffing to render content. And your
CSS3 isn't going to jive with a Nokia X2-01 and the like, so don't even try
that.

~~~
davycro
> People in third-world countries don't care about the average U.S. site, and
> if they did, they would find someone with a computer that probably is 5-7
> years old, possibly older, therefore they wouldn't be using that resolution.

The most popular websites in the developing world are Facebook and Google.
American culture is huge in Africa. Africans visit websites with information
about American movies, celebrities, and rap music. However, less than 5% of
Africans own a computer and of these, few can afford an Internet connection.
Over 90% of Africans rely entirely on prepaid mobile phones to access the
Internet. They do not use computers. I estimate that a billion or more people
are using these devises to browse the Internet.

------
ricardobeat
None of those phones rank high for sales in Brazil. Despite average income
still being low, smartphone sales are skyrocketing (77% up in first-half of
2012).

In addition, most feature-phones these days are actually pretty decent (webkit
browsers, > 320x480 res). With S40 and Firefox OS set for growth I think we
won't need to worry about the odd ones much longer.

------
ksherlock
And don't forget all the people still using WAP/WML!

