In this article “device” means a small, mobile unit such as smart phones and PDAs. The rules for designing for small devices are mostly the same as the rules for good design in general, but some factors are particularly important.
Low bandwidth
Downloading pages from a mobile device is slower and more expensive than it is from a stationary PC with broadband or in a company intranet. Efficient coding will make the pages feel more responsive for everyone, but the speed-up is particularly great for devices. Better code also reduces server load. As a rule of thumb there shouldn’t be more markup than there is text. A well designed HTML page should have so little markup that it is possible to read the page from the source code.
More space consuming than the code itself (HTML, CSS and scripts) are the attached images, applets, and other media.
Other factors covered in the article are :
- Making compact code
- Efficient graphics
- Browsing without graphics
- If you use graphics for headlines how to do it?
- If you use graphics for navigation how to do it ?
- The Device Screen
- Window management, frames (Avoid using frames)
- Window management, pop-ups
- Limited Input Capability
- No mouse
- Event handling
- The Processor, Memory and Storage
- Java and plug-ins
Read the entire article here.
Source: Opera
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