The Coding Humanist

Over the last few months the Dallas Node.js meetup has been pretty spotty attendance-wise. Actually, it just hasn’t been happening. It is time for that to change.

Let’s talk about mobile web development some more! The principle of progressive enhancement is a general principle of front-end web development with wide applicability. Because you have a wide range of capabilities in mobile browsers, the principle is very important in this space as well.

A couple days ago I blogged about the viewport meta tag. It is a handy little meta tag for your mobile sites, for sure. For installment 3 of 7,867,543 on mobile web development, the next natural step is to talk about media queries.

Yesterday I posted what is basically my intro to this series on mobile web development. For a bit we are going to talk about some things that affect mobile web development whether you are focusing on just making some content work on mobile or if you are building a mobile web app. The first thing to talk about is the viewport meta tag. To show what this does, we’re going to iterate through making a page mobile-friendly. First, the page without modifications:

The mobile web is on my brain constantly these days. This is partly because I work as a development lead for Match.com in their mobile group, and I happen to be working on a big mobile web project for them (yet-to-be-launched). This is partly because I have...um...other projects around mobile web going on. This is also because Match gave me an iPhone. My first smartphone was a Windows Phone 7 device. Given that I have in the past much indulged myself in the Microsoft Kool-Aid, I bought that thing the day it came out. In general the phone was very good but the browsing experience was very bad (it got better with “Mango”, but it remains less than thrilling). So owning that deviced did not at all excite me about mobile web development. But then I switched to the mobile group at Match and they gave me an iPhone. Suddenly, I had a device that had a great browser. Perhaps you are surprised, but that makes a huge difference. And I’m a web developer by trade anyway, so the world of mobile web development offers an interesting new avenue.

Last month I read a great book. It is one of those “must reads” about JavaScript as far as I’m concerned. I’m talking about Alex MacCaw’s book “Javascript Web Applications.”

This month I have two technical talks, and in this case they are back-to-back tomorrow and Thursday. I didn't need to relax anyway...

This last Saturday the North Dallas .NET User Group sponsored “Full Stack Day”, and all-day, hands-on event to learn a full stack for web development, DB (Sql Server), web framework (ASP.NET MVC, C#), Css and Javascript. Many who do web work only know part of the stack, and my contention is that it is very useful to get some level of proficiency in the whole. So all day Saturday I taught and live-coded a to-do list app with about 35 people as an exploration of the full stack, along with some time for hands-on labs.

Though mine is still in process of being shipped, Match received their Kindle Fire devices today. I got to play with it a little and test some pages with it. I also needed its user agent string, which I couldn't find on the web. So here it is: