10 January, 2011

Written by on CSS Wizardry.

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I wrote a few days ago about one or two changes under way at CSS Wizardry. A couple of minor things have changed since then, too.

Firstly I decided to do a tablet-optimised (read, less than 800px wide) version of the site. The reasons behind this are:

1. I’m really keen to pour even more effort into CSS Wizardry in 2011, I’ve promised myself that I will make this year better than the last one. As such I thought the time taken to create the tablet version would be well worth it.

2. CSS Wizardry has always had a mobile version, but the inclusion of the <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0" /> meta tag caused it to ‘break’ a little on the iPad, to circumvent this I resorted to some browser-sniffing to omit that code from the iPad. This is obviously bad because a) well, how wrong is browser sniffing?! and b) I was building for >800px, not just iPad. Whilst it might look okay on the iPad but I had no idea how bad things were on other devices.

So the sub-800px version is live and active (size your browser down to see it). A few people on Twitter suggested that user-pinch-zooming should be allowed, however I really don’t want it enabled on the iPhone as I feel it provides a more solid feeling experience when the site reads and works like a native app.

The font-size is more than adequate for easy reading without needing to pinch-zoom and the only way I could allow it on one and not the other is to go back to browser sniffing, which I really don’t want to do.

However I hear people loud and clear and I’m still pondering what to do…

Secondly, further to my joining Smashing Magazine’s Experts Panel, I have also just joined the Smashing Network.

Vitaly and the team have played a huge role in the recent success of CSS Wizardry, with regular tweets and mentions of my articles, so a massive thanks to those guys!