Now that iOS, Android, and BlackBerry all have a new implementation of position: fixed let’s see what changed since the last time we looked.

Because it’s fairly hard to describe what mobile and tablet browsers do to position: fixed I decided to make four short videos, both to help you understand the issues better, and to practice a bit with shooting videos of mobile browsers.

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Yesterday Horace Dediu tweeted:

A browser is an infinitely flexible interface, but is it the best interface for everything? Apps allow experiments in new interaction models

The browser is not the most advanced interface there is. It’s too easy to build the wrong features into something as flexible as a browser, and once a badly-designed feature gains traction it’s impossible to get rid of it. (See HTML5 drag and drop.)

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Three news items that have nothing to do with each other, except they caught my eye yesterday and today, and might be of interest to others, too.

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Web developers are quite annoyed that position: fixed doesn’t work on mobile browsers, but mobile browser vendors cannot afford to support it. This dilemma is unsolvable by the means we presently have at our disposal.

To offer a way out, I’m proposing to create a new position: device-fixed declaration better suited to the mobile scenario with its tiny screen and its zoom. The zoom aspect, in particular, is completely ignored by the spec, and so far mobile browsers haven’t found a good solution, either.

With a new value, fixed positioning could be split into a desktop and a mobile variant, and browsers could decide which one to support. That would allow web developers to devise separate solutions for desktop and mobile.

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As we all know, media queries are by far the best way to distinguish between desktop and mobile browsers, or, more generically, between the dozens of different screen sizes our users can have. Media queries are the future of the web.

Nonetheless, the fact that they are the future doesn’t mean that there are no problems. One is particularly tricky: what do we do for browsers that don’t support them?

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If you want to make your websites ready form mobile, it’s best to combine <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width"> with width media queries. That will give your site the optimal width (as determined by the device vendor, who really ought to know), and your site will look the better for it.

Lanyrd, Simon and Natalie’s latest brainchild, uses exactly this technique, and it establishes the perfect mobile browsing baseline. Try it on as many mobile browsers as you can, and you’ll see. No frills, just a simple user experience that just works.

In order to understand why we should use exactly this combination we should briefly repeat what meta viewports and media queries are all about.

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On Tuesday Jason Grigsby challenged the conventional view that media queries are all we need to make a website mobile-friendly. Although he’s right when he points out some serious problems, I do not think that media queries are the “fool’s gold,” as Jason says. The message seems to be more that media queries alone are not enough to make your sites mobile-friendly. An additional component is required.

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