A new year, a new CSS Wizardry II

Written by Harry Roberts on CSS Wizardry.

N.B. All code can now be licensed under the permissive MIT license. Read more about licensing CSS Wizardry code samples…

I wrote a few days ago about one or two changes under way at CSS Wizardry. A couple of minor things have changed since then, too.

Firstly I decided to do a tablet-optimised (read, less than 800px wide) version of the site. The reasons behind this are:

1. I’m really keen to pour even more effort into CSS Wizardry in 2011, I’ve promised myself that I will make this year better than the last one. As such I thought the time taken to create the tablet version would be well worth it.

2. CSS Wizardry has always had a mobile version, but the inclusion of the <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0" /> meta tag caused it to ‘break’ a little on the iPad, to circumvent this I resorted to some browser-sniffing to omit that code from the iPad. This is obviously bad because a) well, how wrong is browser sniffing?! and b) I was building for >800px, not just iPad. Whilst it might look okay on the iPad but I had no idea how bad things were on other devices.

So the sub-800px version is live and active (size your browser down to see it). A few people on Twitter suggested that user-pinch-zooming should be allowed, however I really don’t want it enabled on the iPhone as I feel it provides a more solid feeling experience when the site reads and works like a native app.

The font-size is more than adequate for easy reading without needing to pinch-zoom and the only way I could allow it on one and not the other is to go back to browser sniffing, which I really don’t want to do.

However I hear people loud and clear and I’m still pondering what to do…

Secondly, further to my joining Smashing Magazine’s Experts Panel, I have also just joined the Smashing Network.

Vitaly and the team have played a huge role in the recent success of CSS Wizardry, with regular tweets and mentions of my articles, so a massive thanks to those guys!

N.B. All code can now be licensed under the permissive MIT license. Read more about licensing CSS Wizardry code samples…

By Harry Roberts

Harry Roberts is an independent consultant web performance engineer. He helps companies of all shapes and sizes find and fix site speed issues.