I was poking around the web trying to find a comprehensive list of what script events different browsers supported, so that we could design web sites with Javascript without just targeting a single browser. What I wanted to know is how user interaction could trigger scripts.
This was hard enough to find that we created a page on our mobile design resources wiki. We’d appreciate help: I couldn’t find this information for Nokia at all, and Opera Mobile’s documentation was exceedingly breezy. Pocket IE’s information was extremely difficult to find. I’m providing all these links so enthusiasts come correct us, especially Opera folks.
The obvious mobile web scripting interaction design principles are:
- provide a non-script version of the page, unless you really don’t care about the majority of phones
- avoid getting fancy with DOM events: many devices will generate mouseenter, mousedown, click, mouseup, mouseleave with a single user click
- provide mouse equivalents of key events, as many devices don’t support key events at all
- supplement mouse events with key events, as some very high end browsers are on devices without touch screens
- build a version of the page that works with server-side scripting
- beware of other script inconsistencies, though mostly that can be left to developers
What else should we add to this list?