HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
IE sometimes marches to its own drummer, so if you want to support IE9 (as you should), you should at least
bring your app up on an emulator early in the process and test on the real hardware early and often.
Tablets
With all the discussion of phones, don't forget about tablets: a rapidly growing market segment sitting squarely
between traditional mobile and the desktop. Tablets have their own issues. They are generally underpowered
compared to desktops but have higher screen resolutions than phones, meaning games need to push lots of
pixels without necessarily having the hardware to back it up. The good news is that WebKit again dominates
the browser space on the most popular iOS and Android tablet devices. The same rules apply: test support for
different capabilities and device screen sizes.
Android provides a particular challenge because the emulator is slow compared to iOS's emulator; so effect-
ively testing the incredibly wide range of Android devices is difficult.
Summary
Mobile browsing is still evolving, both from a technology perspective and from a user perspective. The mobile
browser space is still evolving at a speed comparable to (if not faster than) the desktop space. Any specifics
about which HTML5 features are supported on which mobile browsers may be obsolete by the time this topic
makes it to the bookshelves. Luckily, you know not to bind yourself to specific browsers but rather to the self-
proclaimed capabilities of those browsers.
Never rely on the information in charts for what features you enable per device for your game; always
go right to the source and check capabilities (either directly or with Modernizr). The only time you should
check grids of browser capabilities is to get a sense of what features you should spend time adding to your
game and what portion of browsers implement those features. For a good overview, visit sites such as
ht-
tp://mobilehtml5.org
,
but your best bet is always to try the browsers themselves.
