Hey Ross, thanks for starting this discussion. And what a timely discussion, considering today's Smashing Magazine article is a roundup of Responsive Design (RD) patterns. (www.smashingmagazine.com)
(For those unfamiliar with RD, also check out A List Apart for a great intro: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/) I agree that it would be valuable to make it easier to address mobile and desktop environments, and I've been wondering how to work with web2py on this front as well. I notice that in the bottom of base.css for web2py, there is space for RD, which is a good starting point to have one bass CSS file that can work for desktop and mobile environments. I feel this can work well for pages that would serve the same content to desktop and mobile browsers. But I don't know how common that is. One major issue I find is getting a reliable way to detect a mobile environment. I have worked with some people who are attempting to keep a database of browser agents to determine it that way. I would think it's a nightmare to keep that list up to date. I know the folks at http://yiibu.com/ have come up with a possible solution, following the "mobile first" pattern. But I haven't been able to dive into their code yet. Thus far in sites I've recently developed, I've limited my mobile environment detection to finding out the browser width and using CSS to change the layouts and images. How do you think we can reliably detect a mobile environment?
