Targetting the Kindle

[SilentPanda]

Does anybody know of any resources to help develop/target the Kindle web browser? I know it has a miniscule marketshare of the browser market but I need to do some things on it. While I know my HTML and PHP well enough to get by I'm no professional. Didn't know if any of you guys and gals knew of a resource or two for it.

Thanks!

 

[mkrishnan]

I'm curious what exactly it is ... it's really astonishingly bad. I almost wonder if it's a port of Lynx.

 

[SilentPanda]

I have a Kindle DX sitting next to me. It's just a pain to debug on since you can't view cache/cookies/etc. I didn't know if there was a discussion site somewhere that people had outlined "hey you can't do X and Y but you can get around Z by doing this"....

It also doesn't support CSS... it's bad. I'm having to do some "a real web designer would never do this" stuff to get my layouts right. It can't be Lynx... it displays images. But it's pretty bad.

 

[angelwatt]

Here's an article on the topic.

I didn't even realize it had a browser, though I had heard about downloading blogs at a cost.

Added:
Jakob Nielson on the topic of Kindle Content Design

 

[SilentPanda]

I've read the first link. The second link looks more helpful. It's difficult to search for stuff about the Kindle because a lot of the links go to amazon's kindle store for a book on whatever else is in your search text!

Just for kicks...

 

[angelwatt]

Just for kicks...

That's not half horrible. Better than I expected.

 

[SilentPanda]

Alright so I finally got a fair amount of Kindle DX browser issues resolved. Let me tell any of you, if you try to target the Kindle DX browser for a site it'll be "fun".

I'm finding that it supports kind of "whatever it feels like" as far as HTML goes. For instance it doesn't seem to support the maxlength property of input. While I'm fairly well versed in PHP/HTML I was wondering if anybody knew of a site I could hit that would let you know what the browser you are loading the site in supports and doesn't based on the screen render. I know of the acid tests but that still really wouldn't tell me what failed.

I can of course just write my own test pages I guess. Was thinking there might be something out there though.