12 Jun, 2009
Making a website iPhone-friendly using CSS
Web Development » CSS, Design, Tutorials » Making a website iPhone-friendly using CSS
Unlike any other mobile web browsers, iPhone comes with Safari browser which makes it possible to view any website that works on Safari. However, the challenge is that the screen size of an iPhone is not as big as a traditional monitor and therefore, if you have got a website which has a width of say, 1000px, the website will appear really small and unreadable on an iPhone screen.
Screenshot of Web Development Blog on iPhone
Here are the steps to make a website iPhone-friendly using just CSS.
1. Create a separate stylesheet for iPhone
Tips:
1. Hide unnecessary elements
On this blog, I set the following elements to display: none in CSS. Use display: none rather than visibility: hidden because visibility: hidden will also hide the content inside an element and not hide the element completely.
2. Use a fluid layout
Set the width of your main container (or any other containers) to 100% rather than a specific width in pixel.
For example:
body {
background-color: #fff;
}
.header, .footer {
width: 100%;
}
.sidebar {
display: none;
}
<link media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)" href="/iphone.css" type= "text/css" rel="stylesheet" />
The viewport of an iPhone is 320 pixels in portrait orientation and 480 pixels in landscape orientation.
2. Specify meta data for viewport
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;" />
Here, I am not specifying any width because I am using a fluid layout. Setting the user-scalable property to 0 (false) ensures that the user isn’t able to zoom in or out the website. Refer to Safari HTML Reference – Supported Meta Tags to see any other meta tags that you might want to use.
3. Create an icon
This is very much like a favicon that will be used when the user add your website to their home screen. Use the following code to specify a custom icon. The icon should be at least 57×57 pixel.
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/iphone.png" />
An example of apple-touch-icon for Facebook
An example of apple-touch-icon for Web Development Blog
4. Putting it altogether
Add all of the above to the <head> section of your website.
<!-- Start iPhone --> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;" /> <link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/iphone.png" /> <link media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)" href="/iphone.css" type= "text/css" rel="stylesheet" /> <!-- End iPhone -->
For WordPress (template specific)
<!-- Start iPhone -->
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;" />
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="<?php echo bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/iphone.png" />
<link media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)" href="<?php echo bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/iphone.css" type= "text/css" rel="stylesheet" />
<!-- End iPhone -->
A few things to note
- The overflow CSS property does not work very well on iPhone. The scrollbars aren’t displayed but you can use two fingers and scroll across the area.
- This solution does not make the website light-weight because all elements on your website are still loaded. However, it does look neater and cleaner because many elements are hidden via CSS using
display: none. - The ideal solution is to develop a special version of the website for iPhone and essentially reduces the bandwidth required to load the website.
