Peter Duggan wrote:
Nanohedron wrote:
I'm afraid I don't know exactly what you mean by this. When my laptop's down or I'm away and I need to access the Board, my mobile does the job just fine so far as I can tell. It's far more of a pain in the ass because it's tiny and fiddly, but I can do it. I've always assumed these limitations to simply be part and parcel of dealing with phones as opposed to full-sized computers, not because of the site itself.
Tiny and fiddly means not properly designed for mobiles.
Quote:
Maybe there is a better way, but I have no idea what that would be, and if, as s1m0n suggests, doing so would be to the detriment of computer access to the site, I'm against it.
But optimising for mobiles
to the detriment of computer access is equally unnecessary. There is a better way, and it's designing properly for both (indeed
all devices). Things like forum software have been slow to catch up but AFAIK all/most of the major players are moving towards it now (my favourite SMF, for example, has developed a responsive default theme for SMF 2.1 though I'm not running it yet on my one remaining forum because 2.1's still beta).
The best modern practice is generally considered to be designing 'mobile first' with enhancements for larger viewports rather than big-screen layouts that degrade gracefully for smaller devices, though it's arguable that the end user shouldn't be able to tell the difference either way because it should just 'work' and look/feel right to anyone on anything if it's done properly.
For a brief example (and then we can get back to talking about hay bales):
Chiff&Fipple is built on phpBB v2.0.
However, the makers of phpBB (also named phpBB) have a support forum running v3.2.
Here is the link for the phpBB support forum:
https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewforum.php?f=466Do this: Open both C&F and the phpBB forum on a mobile device or on a desktop.
On Desktop:
On desktop, while you have C&F showing, manually make the window smaller and see what happens.
Now, do the same with the phpBB website showing.
On the phpBB website, some pictures will change sizes and at a certain point, some parts of the forum give away in order to allow more important elements to have more room.
C&F doesn't do that. On C&F the paragraphs just get taller and thinner.
On Mobile:
On mobile, just look around at what things are different: what forum elements are missing in comparison to others? This is part of mobile friendly: some elements give way in order to allow more room for the forum's content.
I wanted to suggest this example because the phpBB website is basically the same as C&F on Desktop, but differs a fair bit on mobile to allow it to be read easily.