On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 12:58 AM, Paul M Foster <paulf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote: > This is sort of obliquely related to PHP. > > I don't have a smart phone, but I need to know a couple of things: > > 1) Do smart phones use the same browsers as the desktop, or do they have > their own stripped down versions of browsers? > Both, although more and more smart phones join the ranks of the desktop-quality browser every day (iPhone and Android both have very capable browsers, with the iPhone's omission of flash support being the biggest difference between these two.) > > 2) When a browser broadcasts its header telling the server what kind of > browser is involved, do they broadcast anything in the header to > indicate that they're being run on a smart phone? > Yes, but that gets complicated quickly: http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/mobile_ids.html > > 3) Bonus question: Is there a preferred method amongst coders to > determine what type of environment is being browsed from, so as to serve > up the proper type of page (desktop or smart phone version of a > webpage)? > To supplement the alistapart link already mentioned, here's another recent writeup: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/how-to-serve-the-right-content-to-mobile/ I develop mobile games and websites, and I never use the User Agent to alter site/presentation. Media queries and types are the way I handle this (sometimes creating separate mobile resources, but most of the time creating designs that adapt accordingly.) All this to say, I don't use PHP to handle this aspect of the development. Adam -- Nephtali: A simple, flexible, fast, and security-focused PHP framework http://nephtaliproject.com
