Mobile Web, Baby Web, and Headache Web

Just to give you a little idea of how much of a pain Mobile Web is, I’d like to give you today’s headache:

So, we rolled out a few weeks back an updated mobile version of PhoneNews.com. Looked great… had a few bugs, but the worst of all… it looked terrible on iPod touch and iPhone. Not good. Okay, so what’s causing it? Well, we pinned it down to how the code was preparing variable-width font sizes. Basically, it was making the font too big, and iPhone/touch translated that as “resolution-independent large”.

Okay, so, fix is simple… ditch the variable font size. Great, right? Wrong. Now the code looks terrible in the latest version of Opera Mini 4 beta. And, since that’s about to go final, it means we now have to find a new solution. Oh, wait, we’re firing Joomla in 45 days, so I’m not going to worry about it. Did I mention we fixed this in our WordPress code already?

Yeah, this is the last time we plug WordPress for awhile, there will be plenty of time for a lovefest in the months (and hopefully, years) to come.