Responsive - All elements are way too small on mobile devices - html

I am working on a website right know, but I have a weird issue with the view on mobile devices.
When I resize the window on a desktop browser the elements and fonts are changing with the viewport how they should.
When I open the website on a mobile device all fonts and elements (e.g. the burger menu) are way to small. It looks like it is a scaling issue or something similar.
I have the meta viewport tag in the head so that is not the issue.
I couldn't find any similar questions here or on any other forum. I hope somebody can help.
I have attached some screenshots, but if necessary I can provide the URL.
Thank you in advance.
Full Screen Window
Resized Window
Responsive example 1
Resposive example 2

Make sure to include responsive meta tag to insure that your browser gets the right width of your device instead of zooming out the page
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
This means that the browser will (probably) render the width of the
page at the width of its own screen. So if that screen is 320px wide,
the browser window will be 320px wide, rather than way zoomed out and
showing 960px (or whatever that device does by default, in lieu of a
responsive meta tag).
Further reading Here

Related

How to force mobile browsers to display entire web page without zooming in?

I have a non responsive web page that has centered content 700px width 700px height. I'm having trouble getting mobile devices to display the content (I'm testing with Chrome on Android, but I'm guessing the same issue occurs with other devices as well). I've tried various things with viewport meta and css media screen, but Chrome keeps zooming in on some portion of the page instead of displaying all of the content. This is surprising to me, because when I visit websites which are clearly not optimized for mobile devices, my usual experience is that I see the entire page "zoomed out" and I can then zoom in. I was expecting my page to also work like this, and no matter what I do, I can't get my page to work like that.
Additionally: bonus points if you know a way to "auto-zoom" so that the centered content is fully displayed without displaying empty space. Like a viewport meta tag that defines both minimum-width and minimum-height simultaneously.
Did you set <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">?
More info on the viewport meta tag

How to set a minimum width for responsive web design and then let device zoom to fit below that point?

I'm working on a semi-responsive web design that adapts (has responsive behaviour) to any screen width above 480px. However, my layout can't adapt to fit a screen width under 480px. Below that point, I would like the mobile device to work its magic and zoom out the page content (scale it down) so it fits the device width without the need for horizontal scrolling.
I've read both Android and IOs documentation on the ViewPort meta tag and tried many different combinations. The code below will let the layout responsive behaviour "work" when above 480px and then it will zoom out to fit screen width when below 480p, as expected.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=480">
However, if zoom is applied by the user it will save that state for the current mobile browser window and horizontal scrolling will be shown and will not go away unless the user manually zoom out. It won't reset to the expected zoom even if the user reloads the page. At least, that's the behaviour when tested on iPhone. I don't know where to test it for different Android resolutions.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=480, initial-scale=1">
If I add initial-scale, as seen above, the zoom will reset when the page reloads, but since its set to 1 it won't scale down to fit the device width without horizontal scrolling. Instead, it will have 100% width (480px) and show horizontal scrolling on screens under that resolution.
I would like to understand more about ViewPort meta tag behaviour on different devices based on its attributes so I can be sure to have the results I expect in all devices and resolutions. In this case, I want to keep it responsive above 480px and let the mobile device scale it down below that so it fits the device width without horizontal scrolling. Can it be done using only the ViewPort meta tag? If not, I would prefer a solution without having to use any JS library, if possible.

Set different viewport width for different devices with client code?

I'm making a responsive site with three states (full, 480px and 320px).
Scaling to device-width look good on smartphones and devices with screen smaller than 700px, which is where the first responsive mode kicks in.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"/>
However, on the iPad i want the width to be 1200px so the page initially shows zoomed out in it's "full glory".
Is there any way to make this by client side code? I know i could fetch user agent on server side but since i am not making the back end code, i'd prefer a html/js solution.
Of course, a responsive state for iPad's would be ideal, but there's not time or money for that and the desktop site works good enough.
Don't know if it will be the solution for anyone else coming here, but what solved this to me was setting min-width to each responsive states <body>.. made the site load decent enough on the ipad..

Confused on "initial-scale=1.0" - iphone 3GS vs 4 [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Android viewport setting "user-scalable=no" breaks width / zoom level of viewport
(3 answers)
Closed 8 years ago.
I'm having some problems getting my website to scale correctly for mobile devices.
We have a site that's designed to be a minimum width of 640px, maximum of whatever. I have the meta tag currently:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width;minimum-scale=0.5,maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=1;" />
Now - The part i'm confused about is that if I use "initial-scale=1.0", obviously the site will scale 1:1, and it will look crappy on an iphone 3Gs (will only see half the site). Now, on an Iphone 4, (having a 640px wide resolution) it will be scaled properly at 640px if I use "initial-scale=1.0".
Alternately, if the graphics are 480px, 3Gs would require scale=.667 and iOS 4 would require 1.3, correct?
So how do you get the site to fit perfectly edge to edge? Can the browser detect the device width and then set the scale accordingly?? There are lots of different device widths out there... android, older iphones, blackberry's etc.
Getting quite frusterated :( Feel like i'm missing something important that I should already know.
Edit It seems that the 'initial-scale' meta tag should be scaling the site relative to the viewport, then using width=device-width to set the actual viewport size.
The problem I seem to be having is that the viewport isn't scaling to fit the device, it's staying at 640px no matter what tag I use. What am I missing here???
I think the main issue with the original message is that semi-colons don't appear to work on iPhone 4+. It only works with commas as separators (or only the device-width setting). Other browsers seem to be more tolerant.
The following works reliably for me:
<meta name="viewport"
content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1,maximum-scale=1" />
You'll also want to disable the body and document from scrolling horizontally:
body, html
{
overflow-x: hidden;
}
Good link for more info on Mozilla Site:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Mobile/Viewport_meta_tag
"width" is to tell the browser how wide your website is at 100% zoom. if you have designed your website to be fluid, you could specify "device-width" here, and the browser won't need to use any zooming, as your layout is designed to fit any viewport width.
"initial-scale" is for overriding the default behaviour of some devices to zoom in or out on your website so that the website width (which you specified above) matches the screen width. setting this to 1 basically says "don't zoom for this, use scroll bars if my website is too wide for the screen, and leave blank space at the sides if it's too narrow". if you do want your website to fill the screen width exactly, don't use initial-scale.
Ok, i've figured it out... essentially.
Because my design is actually 2x the size of the viewport (sort of), the key is just to use "initial scale = 0.5". It works correctly on both devices (3Gs and 4), and more or less correctly on android devices, etc.
Kind of tricky, and it seems like there should be a better way to do this, but for the time being, it works.
Thanks all who provided input.
I believe that the answer is that you want to tell the web browser to always scale the site to 640 pixels. I would even turn off the ability for users to scale the site so that stray drags don't re-size everything.
Try this:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=640; user-scalable=no;" />

Optimize a web page for Palm Pre

I'm in the process of building a support page for my pre application.
I'm having a problem where the content on the page is very small, so the user has to manually zoom in to read it.
I've made the page so that there is nothing very wide or tall, but for some reason everything is very "zoomed out" when you first navigate there on the Pre.
I've noticed that sites like wikipedia have versions that are perfectly optimized for the Pre. How can I make my pages start out "full-sized" the way wikipedia does?
Update:
The extremely simple page that I am currently testing with.
On the above page I have tried setting the width for every element to both 310px and to 100%, the result is always the same.
I figure I can accomplish this by giving everything a static width and then making everything use a very big font size. I'm just guessing that there is a "better way", i.e. some way to let the pre browser know that it doesn't need to start zoomed out to the size of a "normal" web page (it seems that the default zoom is about 1024px wide, even though the actual rez is 320px).
I found out the proper way to do this on the webOSDev forums.
The following should be in the header:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width"/>
<meta name="viewport" content="initial-scale = 1.0"/>
This has the advantage that when the user turns the device into landscape mode, everything scales appropriately, without any styling gymnastics.
Posting a URL of a problem page would be a big help here.
In general, to show nicely on smartphones, the design of the page has to be "fluid" (taking 100% of the width in percent - not specified in pixels) to use the most space in differing screen resolutions. The minimal width supported by the design should be about 300 pixels, to fit without zooming on 320x480 screens.