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Among the many websites that are out there, few are standards-compliant. Among those few, only a handful sport style sheets adjusted to the needs of handheld devices. Of those which do offer styling for handhelds, not all will fit the smallest, lowest-resolution screens without presenting the user with the ultimate handheld horror: namely, horizontal scrolling. The Opera browser runs on handheld devices of all screen sizes and resolutions, some of them only 120 pixels wide. We work for the company that produces Opera, so we can offer a degree of insight into the functions of Opera for handhelds. In this article, we've prepared a set of general suggestions for creating a handheld-friendly style sheet, along with a few Opera-specific pointers that you may find useful.

The past couple of years have seen numerous new web-capable mobile devices arise, including Apple's iPhone and its Safari browser, the creation of Google's Android platform and Webkit-based browser, the rise of so called "full web" browsers (Nokia's S60, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini, among others), the early development of Firefox's mobile version, and more. These mobile browsers improve users' experiences, giving them access to websites formerly off-limits to most mobile devices. Indeed, as a 2008 Nielsen Media Research report highlighted, mobile devices have increased traffic by an average of 13% across several popular websites.

The modern web is viewed on many different devices, so it is getting increasingly important for us to think about how to create our web sites so that they will serve the right content to users, no matter what device they are using. We have many technologies at our disposal, including media types, media queries, and browser sniffing, but what's the best way to handle this?

We hear your words. Why another JavaScript framework?! When development of PhoneGap was under way we noticed slow load times for modern JavaScript frameworks (such as Prototype, MooTools, YUI, Ext and (yes) even jQuery. A big reason why these libraries are so big is because is mostly they contain a great deal of cross browser compatability code. The mobile space has less browser implementations (so far) and different needs. Thus XUI. XUI strives to be a framework for first class mobile device browsers such as WebKit, Fennec and Opera with future support under consideration for IE Mobile and BlackBerry.

The Wall Street Journal broke the news today about Sprint's version of the HTC Touch Diamond, a Windows Mobile smart phone with a touch screen and a new, 3-D interface.

Helping detect and better serve mobile browsers It's easy to create a mobile website and .mobi domain names are affordable but to make the most of mobile you first need to be able to detect mobile devices! Only then can you start to best serve the needs of your mobile visitors! This PHP function lets you choose how to manage your mobile visitors, they can be redirected to a page built for mobiles or you can use it to decide what to show them.

Developing for the iPhone is great, but it's only a sliver of the mobile market, and the real world of mobile development is a lot hairier. Opera developer relations manager Chris Mills writes about do's, don'ts and best practices.