iPhone

Helmuth Hubener posted on Sat, Mar 27 2010 7:09 PM

rated by 0 users

Follows a copy of correspondence I had with a web browser developer on whether the mises.org forums could be made to work on an iPhone.  I hope it is useful information to the webmasters and administrators of the Mises site.

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> I use a site called mises.org. It has a forum that does not quite work
> on iCab Mobile (nor on Safari Mobile, nor any other iPod/iPhone
> browser). The problem: the text input box to post a reply is not
> recognized as a text input box. See thread here:  > mises.org/Community/forums/t/10318.aspx.

I fear this can't be fixed on the browser side. The problem with these "rich text" editors is that they are using the textarea indirectly. The textarea  isn't used as defined in its standard way. This works (most of the time) for desktop browsers where there's a keyboard focus all the time and where certain events are always present. But on the iPhone this is not the case. Many events which are standard on the Desktop are not available at all on the iPhone (like "hover"). And probably even certain keyboard events are not available because of the different hardware (a touch screen is different to a mouse and a real keyboard, so this won't even change in the future. So a "hover" effect can never be available for a touch screen device).

I think that the page is unable to activate the textarea because certain events are not available on the iPhone. So only when the web page takes into account, that there're also input devices which are different to mouse and keyboard, this might work. Or if the page would simply fall back to the plain and simple standard way to use HTML elements like Textareas on mobile devices like the iPhone....

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Alexander Clauss

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In light of this, perhaps the only solution is to switch forum software. Until then, we iPeople will have to keep manually entering our <p>s in the raw HTML editor.