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From: John Stumbles <john.stumbles@ntlworld.com>
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets,comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html,comp.lang.javascript
Subject: Re: fixed position sidebar and small screen/mobile devices?
Date: 11 Feb 2011 16:23:09 GMT
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On Fri, 11 Feb 2011 06:26:49 -0800, David Mark wrote:


>> However on an Android (and possibly other mobile devices, or if one
>> resizes a conventional desktop-based browser down to a small enough
>> window) the user can't scroll away from the fixed elements to view the
>> content.
> 
> Fixed elements or not, they should still be able to scroll the
> document.  Some mobile devices (e.g. iPhone) show only a portion of
> the viewport at a time though.
> 
> Perhaps you mean they can't scroll to see the entire vertical sidebar
> (as the content is not large enough to permit scrolling)?

I don't have a 'droid but someone with an HTC Hero tells me if he scrolls
sideways to get to the content pane, after a second or so the sidebar
repositions itself over it. If I resize a desktop-based browser window
small enough the fixed side and top bars do get in the way so maybe that's
what he's getting.

> You certainly can't browser sniff on the server.

With PHP I can pick up the user agent e.g.
<?php
    if (preg_match("/Android/", $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"],
    $matches)) {
        # do whatever
    }
?>

The HTTP_USER_AGENT for the problem unit is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1- update1; en-gb; HTC Hero Build/ERE27)
AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17

> It would be OK, but it would be much better if you kept scripting out
> of your layout.

That's what I'd rather do. Thanks.

-- 
John Stumbles

Fundamentalist agnostic