Special Report - Mississauga North Stars

SPECIAL REPORT : Mobile Devices

All pages are mobile-friendly: you can use the site using cellphones and other mobile devices which have sufficiently capable browsers; see the sidebar Which Phones Work? for details.

In addition, a team has a special Mobile News Page which is optimized for mobile devices.

Note : many pages require that a lot be downloaded. For a team site’s standard News page, for example, about 180K may be downloaded. Keep this in mind if you have to pay for the amount downloaded to your mobile device. Use bookmarks to go directly to pages you often visit. And, if what you want is simply news or contact information, use the team site’s Mobile News Page instead of the standard News page, because only half as much must be downloaded for the Mobile News.

Which Tablets Work?

The site should work on tablet PCs, but better on those with larger displays, e.g. Apple’s iPad. Those using tablets, however, should consider using a Calendar page in List Mode, especially when using the tablet in portrait mode.

Which Phones Work?

The site should work well with recent versions of: Opera, Gecko-based browsers, and WebKit-based browsers.

Opera

Opera Mini, the world’s most popular mobile browser, can be installed on a vast number of phones — including many low end phones — and many people can install it if their phone’s native browser isn’t good enough. See the list of supported phones for details.

Opera Mobile, more capable than Opera Mini, can be installed on many smartphones, so again many people can install it if their phone’s native browser isn’t good enough.

Caution : how well this site works can depend on how the browser is configured. E.g., the site works best with Opera Mobile when its “Mobile View” option is ON.

Gecko-Based

Some browsers use Firefox’s “Gecko engine”, including Firefox Mobile and Skyfire. More will use Gecko as phones improve.

WebKit-Based

Many browsers use Apple’s “WebKit engine”, including the browsers for: Apple’s iPhone and iPad; many phones using the Android operating system (e.g. from Google, HTC, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson); and phones from RIM which use the Blackberry version 6 operating system. More phones will use the WebKit as smartphones become more popular.

Other Browsers

The site may work with other browsers too, but this hasn’t been tested: it will work with more phones as they adopt better browsers.

Why Phones Fail?

Some phones won’t display pages properly because the phones are too primitive. In technical terms, the site needs a browser that supports HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, including either CSS 2.1 “media rules” for handheld media, or CSS 3 “media queries”.

But some phones fail to display pages properly because the phones are too smart: they pretend to have displays wider than they truly possess, tricking this site into displaying pages as if on a PC. With Opera Mobile, for example, the phone pretends to have a wider display unless the “Mobile View” option is on, so this site displays page optimized for Opera Mobile only when this option is on.

Note : your browser or screen’s inner width is undetermined. This site assumes you have a mobile browser if the width is 480px or less.

Caution : your browser either doesn’t support JavaScript, or has JavaScript disabled. For more about this, see Special Report: JavaScript.

Note : the site assumes that a mobile device is being used if the browser width is 480 pixels or less.

All Pages

All pages work with sufficiently capable mobile devices, but pages will different than on PCs. This is how a page might look:

Example

Content which isn’t essential to a mobile user is omitted; graphic images are smaller; and pages are formatted to fit within the narrow confines of a mobile device. For example:

Mastheads, menus, and some buttons are simpler and more compact. Also, menus are below the masthead, not on the left side of the page, and some menu text is shorter, e.g. “Teams” instead of “Team Sites”.
Sidebars are part of the normal content, not off to the right.
Information is omitted which is less relevant to those with mobile devices. Decorative graphics, photos, and the team’s Photo and What’s Up pages are also omitted
The resource page “Team Sites” page lists only this season’s team sites.
Upcoming events on a team site’s News page appear below the news items, not on the right.
All upcoming games on the team’s News page are listed: normally this is a user option.
The calendar defaults to list mode instead of grid mode.

Mobile News Pages

A Mobile News page, which is optimized for mobile devices, lists news and upcoming events, just as a standard team News (home) page does, but in a simpler, faster format, with less data downloaded. This page also lists contact information for coaches and other team staff. You should bookmark this page.

This page has the same URL (web address) as the team site’s News page, except that the URL ends in mobi.htm instead of index.htm.

This is how the page might look:

Example

Note that this page has a limited menu, however, a link near the bottom of the page goes to the standard News page, which has the standard menu.

Note : there is one key difference between the list of upcoming events on a News page and the list on a Mobile News page. Whereas a News page normally lists regular games and exhibition games, but not tournament games — the News page instead has a link to the tournament page for its schedule — a Mobile News page lists all games, but no link to the tournament page, so that people won’t have to go to the tournament page to see all the game details.