Designing for Net Devices
November 22, 1999
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Today's internet not only includes those browsing from their desktop or laptop, but those surfing with WebTV, Palmpilots, cellphones and other net-connected devices. In the first part of this series about designing for net devices, we're going to show you how to create a page that looks good in both a Web browser and Web TV, along with the code required to detect the WebTV browser using both JavaScript and Perl.
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Designing for WebTV doesn't have to be a difficult task if you follow good coding practices and validate your HTML before you publish your pages on the Web. For instance, the WDVL pages, though a bit too wide, held up very well on the WebTV Viewer (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: WDVL in the WebTV Viewer
One of the first things you'll need to do is to decide how you want to handle the WebTV browser. Do you want to test for the user's browser and force them to a particular page, or perhaps have the page write specific code for the WebTV browser if it is present? Or would you prefer to design your whole site so that it can be viewed on the WebTV browser. I don't relish the idea of creating two distinct copies of each page on my site, so my compromise is to do my best to ensure that all pages are viewable, and those where it isn't feasable will use browser detection to display another page for WebTV users.
The WebTV Web site has a special section for developers who want to create sites that work well in the WebTV browser (they even have a forum for WebTV developers).
We're going to share some techniques that will enable you to detect the WebTV browser, and either send the browser to the correct page, or the correct page to the browser. We'll also tell you a little bit about resolution and WebTV, and how the use of JavaScript can affect your site.
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