I need the question and answer part of my site to be cellphone accessible. How would I even begin to do this.
First and foremost, use well structured, semantic and well formed html markup. Many, if not most, cells and PDAs simply render the html straight up, linearizing any tables, which can be really ugly; the table layouts, I mean. Most positioning style rules will be ignored. Take care with images, they may not be rendered or if rendered, shrunk to fit. Don't use images to replace text. You may give your page a reasonable test by using Opera's or Firefox's small screen rendering mode. In Opera, I think that's [shift][f11]. In Firefox's developer's extension, it's miscellaneous⇒small screen rendering. IE, of course, is no help. If you want to support WAP enabled cells and PDAs, and you don't care to learn wireless markup language, you can use the html2wml Perl script to make the conversion for you. You may do it yourself from the cli, creating a static, duplicate in .wml format. Or, you may run html2wml as a cgi, converting on the run. For an example of a converted page, see 2col.html for the original, and 2col.wml for the converted. If you don't have a WAP enabled PDA or cell, view in Opera, as it has the proper wml support. View the original in small screen mode while you're at it. cheers, gary
man you know a lot. so how do i let the the site know which medium will be looking at it. say i wanted to have an image layout and a nonimage layout.
I don't think you could reliably sniff capabilities that finely. It's a bad idea to make a page image-dependent anyway, so why not design well to begin with? Look at the pages you're concerned with in small screen rendering mode. Are they OK, or not? If not, fix the design. Are you planning to deliver text/vnd.wap.wml to UAs that accept wml? In that case, convert the html page to .wml and view it in Opera. cheers, gary