CSS for PDAs?

[carld]

I'm looking to have an option for 'pda-friendly' format on web pages, much like the popular 'printer-friendly' format found on many pages.

To display pda-friendly pages (on palm and windows ce), I would like to use a style sheet.

Any suggestions of how to format pages for pdas? Or could someone point me to the right direction?

Thanks for your help.

[Zvona]

I think the best way is to produce "text-only" option, which also can be used when browsing with normal workstation.

End-users browsing with PDA's (or other not-so-common clients) is mainly looking for information - not fancy graphics or applications. Thus, text-only is recommended.

Few points for creating text-only versions:
- structure of the document has to be rationalized. This means you can't define something to top of the page at the end of source.
- dimensional (width/height/size) definitions must be avoided. Usually client knows better it's dimensions than you do.
- color scheme should be black/white. If you want to use effects on your text, they should be done with bold/italic/underline effects.
- displaying images should be avoided

Many usability&accessibility, which scratches this subject can be found from Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/).

Just remember to be humble. You aren't doing the Most beautiful website of the year, when you're designing content for PDA's.

[carld]

Zvona,
Great tips, thank you! I also read AvantGo does not display italics (neither i or em work) and instead display italics as bold ( http://avantgo.com/doc/developer/styleguide/styleguide.html#WhatsNotSupported ).

I saw a site recommend developers to use the following, so pages may be presented to PDAs in a preferred format:

<style type="text/css" media="handheld">@import "basic.css";</style>

W3 provides more information regarding the handheld media type here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/media.html

Not being familiar with PDAs, do PDAs (palm and windows ce) with current software see style sheets (CSS2) with the handheld media type? I'm curious how well the W3 recommendation is adopted.

[brothercake]

do not use a media type unless you have experience with that medium; at the very least, you must have a test device.

I agree with what Zvona said, but of course you don't need a separate text-only version - an XHTML/CSS webpage has two fundamental layouts - the styled, and the unstyled; a well coded, semantically correct XHTML page will be perfectly comprehensible with no CSS at all, so if you use media="screen" for *all* your stylesheets (except print stylesheets) then you can safely assume that PDAs will get the plain layout, which is what you want.