I'm looking for a way to distinguish which browser is used and then change properties of the DIV's background.
Right now I'm using a picture as a DIV's background and it has to have a fixed width and height. However, when the site is viewed from a mobile browser ( iOS, Android, etc..) I would like to use a simple color as a background and make it flexible in terms of the width and the height.
So.. I guess my question is if there is any good approach for distinguishing which browser is used and then changing DIV's propertied depending on the browser.
Thanks.
Michal
There's two ways to do it, one as Terrik said using Javascript and do it on the client-side, you could use this jQuery plugin to add a class into the body to do it: https://github.com/leopic/Simple-jQuery-UA-Spoofing
The other is actually doing on the server side, check the headers of the page in the request and change your content before the page even loads, for instance in PHP http://php.net/manual/en/function.get-browser.php
My recommendation is, don't do either, develop your page to be responsive and accomodate to different widths/resolutions and not browsers: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/
You could use CSS media queries
This needs to be done using client side, not server side. (i.e. JavaScript not PHP)
If you want to know more about it than just how to do it, go through this site: https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Browser_Detection_and_Cross_Browser_Support
If you just want some sample code and a quick explanation, I've used this before:
http://www.quirksmode.org/js/detect.html
Once you detect that, you can set up an if statement to determine which divs to display.
Well, there are several approach to do that.
AS Terrik said, you can use client side code to dynamic change the page but this is not necessary the best approach.
A mobile page is not only a background color change. It also can be a layout change. I suggest you to use the MVC pattern : same model, same controller but one view by "browser" (device seems to be a better term in your case). When the user thirst visit your site, send the device used to your server and display the good view (via a redirection). Don't forget to save the user agent in the user session to avoid this redirection process for next pages.
I suggest you to look at GWT, which is a powerful framework when you need multi device capabilities.
Related
When developing a website I often use background images for banners. When this website is in a CMS, the images paths come from the database (user uploaded). So I ended up using a style="background-image:url(myImageFromDB.jpg)"
However, this becomes an issue when I want to replace this image with smaller versions of the same image.
A lot of tutorials/guides out there, assume that you already know the path to this image, so you can just use #media queries to easily replace them. But if the path is dynamic, then I can't use media queries (unless they are dynamically written in the head of the document).
So how are people dealing with this issue?
Not using background-images? (using instead?)
Dynamically writing media queries at the head of the document?
Using JS to dynamically load the correct images?
Resizing images dynamically on the server?
My downsides of each method:
1. Downside, can't use some good options such as background-size:cover
2. Need to write server side script figure out what image to load
3. Probably the best option, but need to wait for the JS to load first
4. I have tried this, but without much success.
one thing you can do..
You can assign its width using view port width like width:90vw;.
1 vw=1/100 of total view.
so you need not change the image for small screen.
you can just simply add this in your media query and default css also.
width:90vw;..
you can change width as your requirement.
so it will act dynamically.
not need to change the image.
hope it works.
I'm trying to create a gallery for a mobile site where I have different stylesheets for different sized devices. Within these stylesheets I have several classes which simply set a background url property to each image I want in the gallery.
Only one of these will be displayed at a time. And I will be cycling through the classes using Javascript to display them in a slideshow type presentation.
I am wondering is this method more bandwidth efficient than having all the images as individual img tags within the DOM? By setting these url properties do they get downloaded to the user's browser when they first load the site or are they only downloaded when the class gets set on a div in the DOM?
Simply I am trying to avoid having to download all the different images to the user's device at once. If you know any alternate methods which are better for this sort of thing I am also interested.
You are right, When you set the image backround, the image will only be downloaded if it is used, By this I mean, used as a style on some dom element.
Alternatively, you could 'change' the background-image css property using javascript. This way, you don't even have the image url in your CSS.
If bandwidth is your biggest concern, I would urge you to have a look at the inspector in webkit browsers like Chrome or safari, or with firebug on Firefox to see the 'network' tab, there you have a clear overview of what is loaded, how ( what order ) and how to optimize things. You can also make some stupid mistakes clear like downloading multiple times the same library from different locations and so.
If you just declare the class in css it shouldn't download anything before it is set. however it is a round question and the answer could take a lot of different shapes.
So I would say that yes it is a good way to do it, and it should be more bandwidth efficient (if you don't know that all the images will be loaded eventually anyhow, since you will typically have asynchronous image-loading either way it shouldn't matter much. I guess that if you only load one image initially the other images (i.e. the mentioned img tags) will not interfere making the load a bit more smooth?).
I find it to be a cleaner solution at least if you aren't sure which images will be viewed (which is likely to believe) to use your css-approach. also it's easier to maintain and provide a better design.
That you will be using javascript indicate that you are also doing the client side. And that give you control to choose what to do which is great :)
One alternative could be to have a local cache of the images as well, but that really depends on the problem at hand, if you will have different images and no real possibility to know in advance which images you will need (and perhaps not even how many of them?) then I think that the cleanest way is the way you purpose.
i.e. set up (or dynamically create) css-classes for images and handle all the logic in javascript.
I'm kind of sure this is not possible but I ask because it seems unbelievable.
I have some elements styled for reponsive design
img {max-width:100%;height:auto;}
but the images have to be different depending on the device (I won't load heavy wide screen images on a phone device).
Since media queries aren't supported inline, I could go for a css background solution, but background-size is not perfectly supported and honnestly it would look more like a hack.
Can anyone confirm that "widely supported device related responsive images" are not properly possible ?
Thanks
If I understand your question correctly, you are looking for a way to deliver a different image depending on the viewpoint.
Adaptive Images could be the solution you are looking for. Easy enough to setup and confirm.
A second possiblity which might give you even more control is Adapt.js . I've used it with good success on several sites. You load a small javascript file in the head of your document. This tests viewpoint width and then dependending on the results, it will send the appropriate CSS file. It has wider browser support than #media requests.
If you could live with using background images, then it would work well, and since you could specify different images for different viewpoints, you aren't up the creek with browsers that don't understand background image sizes.
Good luck!
You could try the Responsive Img jQuery plugin.
It's made to automatically create and swap in different-sized images at different breakpoints, based on the container's width.
If you already have different versions on your image created and on your server, the plugin will just swap those in at the right breakpoint sizes.
Therefore, you can create new images for all the different breakpoint sizes you want, and the plugin takes care of the rest.
It's not CSS, but it gets the job done.
2014 update
There is a nice and new technique here :
http://filamentgroup.com/lab/responsive_images_experimenting_with_context_aware_image_sizing/
It requires a small js, a 1x1px blank image, a few extra markup for img tags, and some .htaccess rules.
Seems to work fine so far.
I will be spending the next several weeks transitioning content for my webpage into a mobile version AND a tablet version. I have a few questions to this affect:
What is the accepted way to send users to their correct site, depending on the device/browser they are using? (i.e. do we check in PHP for some kind of browser type or something)? I've looked into nice CSS grids that display great on all devices/resolutions - but at this time I'm not ready to make that full switch - so I'm looking to just have a reduced-version of my current site (whether it's via redirection or something else).
How do we account for hover/mouseover effects in the mobile and tablet space?
Thanks all.
Update:
I did find this for #1: http://code.google.com/p/php-mobile-detect - looks like it's perfect actually.
You should redirect the user based on the user agent, in PHP you can use $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']. Using server side detection is by far the most reliable way to redirect someone. In the future you may consider using a responsive style sheet to change the way your layout is displayed (based on screen size, in a sense is more reliable for future devices)
Touch devices do not have a hover state, that doesn't mean you can't do it with some Javascript onTouch events but it's either on or off when you touch something like an anchor
Is it possible to use CSS to work like frames?
What I mean is, when we use frames (left, right for example), clicking on left will refresh only the right section using the 'target' attribute.
Is it possible to create this effect with CSS?
Thanks.
Using frames is usually a bad idea
To answer your question, no, CSS cannot be used to work like frames. CSS is used to changing the style of HTML and as such, cannot actually change the content of a page. It can be used to hide content, but I don't think that is what you require.
However, I feel in this case you may be asking the wrong question. As frames are usually the wrong approach.
When starting out in web design, frames seem like a great idea. You can seperate your navigation from your content, your site will load quicker because the navigation is not loaded every time and the menu is always visible, even when the page is loading.
But, actually, frames are incredibly bad for your usability.
Your users cannot bookmark individual pages
Printing is broken
Standard features in a browser like open in new tab often breaks
Users cannot copy/paste the web address for a specific page for sending to a friend
Frames do have their uses (e.g. Google image search), but for standard navigation menus they are not recommended. Try creating a page in a dynamic server language such as PHP or ASP.NET.
These languages have ways of creating standard elements such as your navigation menu without the use of frames.
No, this has nothing to do with CSS. CSS is for styling elements only. What you are looking for is an IFRAME. And IFRAME can be given a name
<iframe name="my_iframe" src="xyz.htm"></ifram>
and then be targeted in a link.
I've got a design that relies on framed content using CSS. You can do this by using overflow:auto, however it won't do what you want, i.e. loading certain portions of a page. To do this you'd need to use some AJAX library such as jQuery to load the content area dynamically. This is quite dangerous though as your URL may not relate to the current content of the page.
You could probably do something with the overflow part of CSS.
If you set up a div with overflow:auto with a fixed width and height with alot of content you will get scrollbars. Potentially you could use anchors to get content to move to be viewed within the div.
This means that all your content is in one page and it is just moved around with the anchors. You could do a similar thing using a jquery tabs plugin too.
I have never tried this and it might need javascript to get it to work fully.