The other day we had to prove that locking a form field to numeric-only entry was easy, without Javascript or anything, and … ran into issues with it. This should work:
<input type="text" format="N" style='-wap-input-format: "*N"'/>
But didn’t on the first few phones we tried. It works on “old, crappy phones” but not on all the new, snappy one-web devices. Luckily, it allows free-entry, which I’d normally call “graceful degradation.” But Barbara reminded me it was the opposite; newer, more feature-rich devices have less support for this mobile-specific feature than older devices. It’s not deprecated in favor of another method (AFAIK), it’s just gone. It’s been sacrificed to the “one web standards” movement.
What’s more sad is that we keep running into development shops that don’t know about the mobile way of doing things. Not being aware of wap-input-format is a good example, but it seems like development and markup code in general is suffering from a one-web mindset. More and more, Internet-focused developers and entrepreneurs are entering mobile and assuming that web tools will “just work”. They do, sort of, but not as well.
A number of us around here occasionally show our age, and talk about how film camera (SLR) controls are better than DSLR controls in many ways. Though it’s popular to disregard any old designs and assume they were constrained or stupid, but very often there were good reasons for certain designs, structures and functions. Try to evaluate the value of everything that came before instead of starting over.
(yes, we know that the more common term is “progressive enhancement”)
This is the first post of yours that I am reading. I like the post, but the font is horrible on my machine, except for Safari which seems to make the font readable. Other browsers, IE, FF, Opera, Chrome, the font is small and faded looking.
Sorry, we’re not seeing it. Tried in a few places and its… windows-looking. Sorta jagged and so on, but not extraordinary. Email or link to a screenshot and give me your system specs and we’ll look into it more.
For anyone else debugging our site, we know about the superfluous bullets in the top nav. Don’t care enough to fix it.