[uf-discuss] hAtom handheld CSS..?

[Danny Ayers]

[sorry for not responding sooner, I've got over-zealous mail filters]

On 3/28/06, Chris Casciano <chris at placenamehere.com> wrote:

> Unless you spec out navigation, other content, etc I still don't see
> how you're filling the gap between "feed content" and "web pages" that
> you can navigation around and get to other non-blog or feed related
> content. Reformatting it *ALL* (or in better selected parts) for
> consumption on the other devices is where I can imagine the win being
> and that seems to me to come with XHTML, CSS + Education if good use...
> I still don't see the hAtom win outside of the subscription context
> (which I think is valid, but not handheld specific).

Ok, stepping back a moment.  I recently switched to using a different
CMS for my blog, one which wasn't built specifically for this purpose
and so is lacking in terms of ready-to-use styling, templates,
whatever.  The CMS's developer put in a few hours tweaking CSS for me,
but it's just barely usable in a browser, in fact the markup is still
invalid (I know, I know, I'll sort it soon ;-)

But the content is blog-shaped: a series of entries with title, data
author. Given that there are around 20 million sites of essentially
this shape, it's a little disappointing that there aren't any
widespread conventions for styling, which I could follow in the HTML
templating, to enable me to plug in some ready-made CSS for a nice
presentation.

Which is where hAtom comes in. It does offer a convention for this
shape of material. Assuming I follow the conventions in the HTML, I
get to use any existing CSS that matches these conventions.

For a first pass, following my site transition all I needed was a
basic reverse-chrono view of the items. Sure, site navigation things
are pretty well must-haves, but for my purposes I'd say that basic
view covers 90% of my requirements. The important (!?) bit is my
current blog front page, not archives, blogroll, search box or
whatever.

So back to the handheld case. How am I going to support such devices?
Right now I'm short on time, so I'm probably not going to put *any*
extra effort into doing so. But once I've tidied up the regualr
browser view, if a suitable CSS for hAtom was available, a single
<link> element would cover 90% of the requirements. Even that might
not be necessary, were the handheld browsers to offer hAtom coverage
in their default stylesheet.

As David said, this isn't a complete solution, just a partial one. 
But for potentially 20 million sites, it's the biggest part.

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com