Scott writes about making DasBlog work on Mobile Devices.  The approach he takes is to programmatically detect that the device is a mobile device and then present an optimized TinyHTML (his term) theme.

Ideally though, wouldn’t it be nice to have mobile versions of every theme?  In fact, I thought this could be handled without any code at all via CSS media types.

Unfortunately (or is that fortunately) I don’t own a BlackBerry or any such mobile device with a web browser, so I can’t test this, but in theory, another approach would be to declare a CSS file specifically for mobile devices like so:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="mobile.css" type="text/css" 
    media="handheld" />

The mobile browser should use this CSS to render its screen while a regular browser would ignore this.  Should being the operative word here.  Unfortunately, at least for Scott’s Blackberry, it doesn’t.  He told me he does include a mobile stylesheet declaration and the BlackBerry doesn’t pick it up.  Does anyone know which devices, if any, do support this attribute?

For those devices that do, a skin in subtext can be made mobile ready by specifing the media attribute in the Style element of Skin.config like so (note this feature is available in Subtext 1.5).

<Style href="mobile.css" media="handheld" />

Refer to my recent overview of Subtext skinning to see the media attribute in play for printable views, which does seem to work for IE and Firefox.