Text wrap for "iPhone Friendly" style?

[Bobdude161]

I use the iPhone Friendly forum style for my iPhone and it works great, EXCEPT, when someone has a looooooooooooooong location description. The long, non-text wrapped location descriptions tend to mess with the overall width of a webpage. In the attachment, it's a very fuzzy pic, but as you can see, Abstract has a long location description and it doesn't wrap. Nothing against Abstract (Geez Abstract, get it under control ), just the non-text wrappiness of it all.

 

[Doctor Q]

The first question is whether we can fix this simply by changing a display style. I did some experiments and found that it's not as simple as changing one style. However, perhaps a few coordinated changes could fix it so that Locations wrap while still lining up from post to post.

In the meantime, the result isn't disasterous, but I can see that it could be annoying. There are no rules against long Locations, and I'd rather not identify or discuss specific members here, but if anyone wants to send me a Private Message about a specific long Location, I'd consider asking the member privately if they'd like to shorten it as a courtesy to our iPhone users. They might say no, but at least they'd be aware of the issue.

When using the iPhone Friendly format, don't you find it to be a more common problem that posts contain wide inline images? I wouldn't expect long Locations to show up quite as often as those.

 

[Lau]

I know this is an old thread, but I was just about to start a thread with this very issue and wondered if there's been any headway with a solution to it.

I've been using the iPhone skin for a few weeks now, and I'm definitely a convert to it. However, this one issue does make it a bit frustrating to use. It's not so much having to scroll over to read posts with longer locations (although that is annoying), but it's that it breaks the way the iPhone scrolls. If a page has had to be 'zoomed in' (which is what you have to do with threads that someone with a long signature has posted in), instead of being able to simply scroll up and down with a flick of the finger, you end up scrolling the page left and right as well.



I haven't noticed it being an irritation with large images as much – it definitely seems to be the long locations that are the most intrusive.

For similar reasons, would it also be possible to reduce the margins slightly as well (if there's no technical reason for having them so large)? There's a fair bit of wasted space either side of them (left picture), and so I usually zoom in slightly (right picture) to fill the screen, but this means again, it's possible to scroll left and right on the page again (and I have to zoom in on every page individually).



Hope this makes some sort of sense, it's really difficult to explain. Thanks for reading!

 

[Doctor Q]

Problem solved

Long locations should no longer be a problem for users of our iPhone Friendly style.

Rather than add text wrapping that would use more vertical space on a small display, we changed the iPhone Friendly style so that extra-long locations are not shown above posts at all. Only locations of 40 characters or less are shown, and that covers almost all forum members who have filled in their Location field.

In a related change, when member edit their User Profile from now on, the Location field will be limited to 80 characters. This is more than enough for the real locations or even the joke locations that people have used, but will avoid the extremely long locations that proved to be annoying to other users, even with the default forum style.