Pete LePage

Thoughts on web development, life, and photography.

Using meta viewport to optimize rendering on mobile devices

What is the viewport? # Imagine if every web page you opened on your phone or tablet got the same version as your desktop, and was displayed on the small screen of your device. On a phone, that might mean you would see only the top leftmost corner, a tiny 320px by 480px view, and you’d have to scroll around the page to be able to see everything. (See figure 1). Unlike a desktop or laptop, there is no way to resize the browser window to fit the content that you want to see. Thankfully, on mobile devices,...

Thinking about the offline web

Over the last few months, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to make it easier for developers to build web applications that work offline, its a tough problem to solve. The web has the features/technology to do it, but I think there are two things preventing us from getting there easily. The first is a perception issue for users, many people think that the web only works when they’re online, no internet, no web. That leads to a bit of a catch-22, users aren’t asking for it, so developers aren’t...

Building A More App-y Web

Everyone wants “apps” these days, on their phone, their tablets, Apple, has the App Store to sell apps for the Mac.  The demand is coming from all over the place, including consumers who have no idea what apps are, to people who are seeing this as a new revenue opportunity (which, it is)!  I even heard from one developer who said that his boss came to him all panicked because he got a call from the company’s chairman of the board, wanting to know what their app strategy was.  So far, most of the focus has...