Presumably, I'd be unable to display a 20Mb TIFF file in a browser
running on a device with 16Mb of RAM. That'd be PDA-dependent.

Some browsers work exclusively through a proxy, and all images are
sized down; others provide that ability but its optional. Still others
provide that ability without the proxy, doing all the scaling and
resizing on the handheld. That'd be browser-dependent.

Some browsers aren't afraid of horizontal scrollbars, and are happy to
render the top-left corner of a 1024x768 image on a 160x160 screen,
leaving you to scroll about to see what's what. Some devices have
320x320 high-density screens instead - others 320x480 (or 480x320, or
either depending on the current orientation).

So yeah, its browser dependent, PDA dependent, and you probably
shouldn't worry about it all that much. Write good HTML, keep your
images lightweight to conserve bandwidth, and trust the browser to do
its best to render your content on a tiny little screen. :)  That's
what they're designed to do.

You might want to avoid layouts that absolutely depend on the browser
being a certain minimum width. I tend to code sites using very basic
markup that degrades well in older browsers with none (or limited)
support for CSS, and that often results in the site being easy on the
eyes on a handheld as well. For example, I pull decorative images in
using CSS rather than coding them in HTML. A Tungsten T|3 user using
bluetooth to connect through a cellphone probably doesn't care about
the nifty background image that he'll never be able to see all of
anyway, and there's no point in wasting his money making him download
it.

The best advice I could offer you is to try it out. There are few
things in life as humbling as desiging a killer site that looks
perfect in IE, Opera, Netscape, Mozilla, AND Konquerer, then looking
at it on a cellphone. View your site on as many browsers as possible.
See what happens when a blind visitor accesses it using a screen
reader.

If you're working on a visually artsy sort of site, rather than one
focused on delivering content that's basically textual, you're going
to have a very hard time. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Brandon

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