Coding For Dummies
Book image
Explore Book Buy On Amazon

Although any website can be viewed with a mobile browser, those websites not optimized for mobile devices look a little weird, as if the regular website font size and image dimensions were decreased to fit on a mobile screen. By contrast, websites optimized for mobile devices have fonts that are readable, images that scale to the mobile device screen, and a vertical layout suitable for a mobile phone.

image0.jpg

Building mobile web apps is done using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. CSS controls the website appearance across devices based on the screen width. Screens with a small width, such as those on phones, are assigned one vertically-based layout, whereas screens with a larger width, like those on tablets, are assigned another, horizontally-based layout.

Because mobile web apps are accessed from the browser, and are not installed on the user’s device, these web apps can’t send push notifications (alerts) to your phone, run in the background while the browser is minimized, or communicate with other apps.

Although you can write the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for your mobile web app from scratch, mobile web frameworks allow you to develop from a base of pre-written code, much like the frameworks for programming languages. These mobile web frameworks include a collection of generic components that are reused frequently, and allow developers to build, test, and launch websites more quickly. Twitter Bootstrap is one such mobile web framework.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book author:

Nikhil Abraham is the CFO of Udacity, an education company that teaches technology skills that help launch or advance a career. Prior to joining Udacity, Nik worked at Codecademy where he taught beginning coders across a variety of professions. He is also author of Coding For Dummies and Getting a Coding Job For Dummies.

This article can be found in the category: