PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide, Second Edition

How to Make Your Web Site Palm-Friendly

If you’re designing web pages, you can take a few simple steps to make visiting your site a pleasant experience for fellow Piloteers.

First, of course, never use a clickable graphic button without a text hotlink that does the same thing. Second, if you must use Java or frames on your page, provide an alternative set of pages that work without these Palm-hostile features.

Third, wherever you do use graphics, provide an <ALT> tag in the HTML code for each image. If you know HTML, you know what this means. If you don’t know HTML, and you make your web pages using a program like Claris HomePage or Adobe PageMill, use the View as HTML command. Among the nest of computer codes, you’ll find a line of text like this for each graphic on your page:

<IMG SRC="BostonMap.gif" WIDTH=216 HEIGHT=264 ALIGN=bottom 
naturalsizeflag="3">

Your job is to insert a plain-English label for the picture; this label will show up on PalmPilot web browsers as the name of the missing picture, as shown in Figure 14.8.

To create such a label, type the words ALT="Text label here” into the HTML code just after the name of the picture file. The result should look like this (the insert is marked in bold here for clarity):

<IMG SRC="BostonMap.gif" ALT="Map of downtown Boston" WIDTH=216 HEIGHT=264
ALIGN=bottom naturalsizeflag="3">

Finally, if you plan to offer downloadable files on your page, don’t compress them or encode them; for example, don’t use Base64 or a similar “Content-transfer-encoding” ...