The IE Mobile Viewport on Windows Phone 7

One of the main challenges involved with mobile Web development is getting content to lay out correctly on screens of varying sizes. Over the years, browser vendors have invented a variety of ways to allow developers to control how browsers lay out content, usually using a custom <meta> tag.

First among these was the HandheldFriendly tag, used initially by older Palm models as well as browsers like AvantGo, which has the format:

<meta name=”HandheldFriendly” content=”true” />

This tag indicates to the browser that the page has been laid out by the developer to be viewable on a small screen, and that the browser should not attempt any further layout enhancements. While somewhat effective, it does not offer any granular control over the layout width – it’s just a true/false flag.

Microsoft addressed this particular problem when it came up with the MobileOptimized tag for the PocketPC:

<meta name=”MobileOptimized” content=”320” />

The MobileOptimized tag allowed the developer to inform the mobile browser of the screen width that the page had been optimized for (in this case 320). While an improvement over the simpler HandheldFriendly tag, it still doesn’t offer much control over the layout, especially for devices that have different screen widths.

Today, most modern mobile Web browsers use the Viewport <meta> tag, which allows Web developers to give explicit instructions to a mobile browser regarding how a page should be laid out and respond to user manipulation. The Viewport tag has the format:

<meta name=”Viewport” content=”width=320; user-scaleable=no; initial-scale=1.0” />

The  Viewport tag provides the following settings to allow the developer more fine-tuned control over the content’s layout:

Viewport Property

Width

width

Sets the width of the viewport, in pixels, or the keyword “device-width”, which means whatever the width of the device screen is. The range is from 320 to 10,000.

height

Sets the height of the viewport, in pixels, or the keyword “device-height”. The range is from 480 to 10,000.

user-scalable

Indicates whether or not the user can scale the viewport, or in other words whether or not they can zoom in and out within content. Values can be “yes” or “no”. The default and recommended value is “yes”.

initial-scale

Sets the initial scale of the Viewport*. Allowable values are 0.1 to 10.0

minimum-scale

Sets the minimum allowable scale of the Viewport*. Allowable values are 0.1 to 10.0

maximum-scale

Sets the maximum allowable scale of the Viewport*. Allowable values are 0.1 to 10.0

*Note: In the initial release, IE Mobile for Windows Phone 7 does not support initial-scale, maximum-scale, or minimum-scale.

How Windows Phone 7 Implements “device-width”

The keyword “device-width” is intended to set the width of the Viewport to the width of the device that is viewing the page. On Windows Phone 7, the device width is 480 pixels. However, you will notice that if you set the Viewport width to “device-width”, IE actually sets the width to 320 (and also pins it to 320 if you specify a width of less than 320).

Why does IE do this? We made this decision after a large amount of testing real-world mobile Web sites and learning (to our chagrin) that a very large number of sites out there that were using the “device-width” property were in fact not laid out for the device’s width, but were actually optimized for 320 pixels, probably because the majority of devices available on the market prior to Windows Phone 7 were 320 pixels wide. On many sites, this resulted in an empty strip along the side of the page when viewed in Windows Phone 7, since the sites were often using fixed-width 320px elements like <div> tags.

Faced with the difficult decision of a) shipping a browser on which many common sites didn’t lay out optimally but was technically correct in using device-width, or b) making a slight adjustment to accommodate the many sites that didn’t use device-width properly, we decided to use 320 as the setting for device-width.

In addition, if you use "device-width" and then rotate the screen to landscape, IE Mobile will re-size the Viewport to use the new dimensions. You can choose to re-layout your content by listening for the onResize event and then measuring the new width. For hard-coded numbers, IE Mobile simply scales up the content to fit the screen (which is what most other browsers do).

Default Viewport Widths

Different phone manufacturers have different default widths for the Viewport. The following table lists the known defaults for the current crop of mobile browsers:

Phone Browser

Default Viewport Width

Opera Mobile

850 pixels

iPhone Safari

980 pixels

Android

800 pixels

Windows Phone 7

1024 pixels

 

Windows Phone 7 Support for META Tags

IE in Windows Phone 7 will recognize all three of these meta tags, and will use the settings of the most modern tag that your page includes. IE will look for and use the settings in the following order:

  1. HandheldFriendly
  2. MobileOptimized (overrides HandheldFriendly)
  3. Viewport (overrides both MobileOptimized and HandheldFriendly)

Summary

The Viewport tag provides a de-facto standard way of exerting much better control over your content’s layout in today’s mobile browsers. Hopefully, this post has been helpful in illustrating how IE Mobile uses the Viewport and in making your Web sites look great on Windows Phone.

Happy Coding!

Joe Marini
Principal Program Manager, Windows Phone
Microsoft Corp.
joemarin@microsoft.com
https://twitter.com/joemarini
https://developer.windowsphone.com