arkitrave :: log

It recently came to my attention that the geniuses who programmed Internet Explorer for Windows handheld devices thought it would be no big deal for said browser to parse both screen and handheld stylesheets.

It doesn’t take an MIT grad to figure out that the entire reason for media types is that devices are different. A screen browser reading a braille stylesheet is obviously worthless, but a handheld reading a screen stylesheet is just as bad. In fact, it will often cause the handheld browser to crash. A site we just launched, which I’ll write about later, crashed the IE mobile browser with one CSS declaration of width: 590px;.

After two hours of debugging, I finally discovered that simply referencing the media type of the stylesheet as “Screen” rather than “screen” prevented the handheld IE from parsing the stylesheet. No other browsers appear to choke on “Screen”, so unless anyone has any better ideas, I’m declaring my styles as media="Screen,projection".