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Hi all,

Forking off from the mobile-detection thread:

Does anyone have any favorite books, articles, websites, etc. for the real "how to" business of building mobile-friendly websites. I have been astonished at the apparent dearth of such books, and was delighted earlier this year to discover Jonathan Stark's Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from O'Reilly (2010); he has an Android-oriented version of the book coming out soon too. Although the book contains a lot about designing web pages, the app-building orientation of the book means that it gives short shrift to cross-platform compatibility. What I really want to find is a good guide to "building simple websites that will work on any smartphone, yea, verily, even BlackBerry." (I don't know about anyone else, but I have found BB to not support a lot of things that work well on Droids and iThings.)

For a shorter introduction, I belatedly discovered this article:
Mobile Websites With Minimum Effort.
Authors:    Wisniewski, Jeff
Source:    Online; Jan/Feb2010, Vol. 34 Issue 1, p54-57, 4p

The number-one thing that I learned from Stark's book is something that I had struggled for the longest time with: why does my iThing make all web pages look tiny? The answer: iThings assume that all web pages are 980px wide, and you've got to disabuse them of that notion by the simple expedient of defining a viewport in the page header:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">
(there are several variations of this, and knowing the key word helps to find the rest.)

Does anyone else have a favorite book or three for this kind of work?

Ken