[EDIT:] In other words, Wikipedia seems to be the last vestige of the dumb old "separate web for mobile" mindset of ideas like WML. Media queries are just better, and would prevent this inane "that link sucks for half of us; here's one that sucks for the other half" crap.
Except it doesn't.
The whole idea behind the iPhone's browser was to avoid the need for crappy "mobile" versions of web sites. It's a crying shame that this vision had to fail because a bunch of underemployed web developers were obsessed with fixing things that were no longer broken.
Maybe for first world connections, that could be speculatively preloaded. IP address to lookup country is enough to guess?
What's that, cookies exist? Someone tell people, it seems everyone believes those are just for invading user privacy. (Wikipedia included)
more likely we'll see m.wikipedia.org become more desktop-friendly and responsive before we see it happen to "desktop wikipedia". (and really, the m.wikipedia site is quite nice to use on the 11" screen i'm reading on now)
Except for the deletionists. They like to change things!
There are 13" laptops with a resolution which overlaps with the higher end mobile phones and that is where mq falls apart because you can't tell where you are. The real issue is with all browser reporting the same fixed dpi, for reason which make sense in context but don't allow to discern all cases.
We work with a mix of media query + user agent sniffing to enable mobile queries only on mobile stuff.
It was all fine and dandy as long as pc had >1280 pixels, tablets where between 768 and 1024 and phones below that range. Now that everything overlaps with everything, not so much, and because all browser reports metric around the 96dpi magic number, there's no solution. At least making a media query in em instead of pixel saves you from the trouble with people zooming on pages.
And if your website is responsive and allows iframing, it's even worse.
I'm certainly unaware of browsers doing this, except for a few old ones on desktop and Windows Phone 8's IE, and I can't find anything claiming other browsers do this. Certainly it's never been an issue I've hit.
you can use device-pixel-ratio and the likes to have an hint on the pixel density, which doesn't protect you from the extremes (small, very high density devices and large low density screens)
like the galaxy tab 7.7" has a 1280 width, which would trigger desktop line of queries if you break at 1024 like many do.
> you can use device-pixel-ratio and the likes to have an hint on the pixel density, which doesn't protect you from the extremes (small, very high density devices and large low density screens)
> like the galaxy tab 7.7" has a 1280 width, which would trigger desktop line of queries if you break at 1024 like many do.
Oh, right, so the issue here is the fact we have relatively high density screen (197 PPI) but where 1 CSS pixel still equals 1 device pixel? That seems pretty bad generally, given I presume the same is true for the rest of the OS (AFAIK in general Android browsers just follow the OS here)? It seems like to fix this we'd need to add resolution units giving number of CSS pixels per physical length unit, right?
and then you have iframes, and browser zoom
Do you have examples of other device and browser combinations of this being a problem? Let's make this situation better!
(FWIW, these browsers are likely not conforming CSS implementations, because you either must have 1 CSS inch equal 1 physical inch (and 1 CSS pixel is still 1/96 of a CSS inch, with whatever ratio to device pixel that ends up being), or by relating the CSS pixel to "the visual angle of one pixel on a device with a pixel density of 96dpi and a distance from the reader of an arm's length", but hey, they exist so we may as well add media queries to deal with the resultant fallout.)
[Edit: In the Galaxy Tab 7.7 case, the reference pixel, assuming 15.75" viewing distance (which is totally non-scientifically the viewing distance my partner uses her tablet at) works out to be 1/170th of an inch: almost exactly a device pixel. I guess a lot of the problem with tablets is the viewing distance varies so much...]
Why do they do that?
edit: oh dear, responsive web design.
Sorry for the the tetchy reply, I just find it nuts that, to get around writing maybe a page of CSS, people build and maintain an entirely separate site that has to be in lockstep to the the first, along with ever-reliable sniffing, and then say that is the simpler way to do it. There are several scenarios where it turns.out to be useful; this isn't one of them
A benefit of using CSS is that it handles browser zoom and high dpi screens much better as you can use units other than pixels (eg: em/rem, vh/vw, %).
From a architecture point of view, you want to keep layout logic out of the JavaScript anyways as JS should be for interactions and other 'nice to have' behaviors.
Info on what response design is on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design