Russell Beattie was just about to add handheld CSS support to Mowser and then he realised that CSS3 is causing the death of Handheld Stylesheets:

I was just looking to add in a handheld stylesheet and header into the Mowser WordPress plugin I just posted about, and happened to run across a post about Opera Mini 4 published over at Unintentionally Blank about this very topic, published *just today*. Wow… In the post, Phil points out that Opera Mini 4 has gotten rid of defaulting to the handheld stylesheet, unless you’ve explicitly chosen to turn on Small Screen Rendering (”Mobile view”) in the settings. Interesting! Opera has been one of the leading promoters of Handheld styleseheets, and their Opera Community site is still the best example of how to use it on the web today.

By choosing to default to non-handheld views, I have to agree with Phil that Opera seems to have given up the fight on this particular battle, and is instead banking on more sites using CSS3 instead. Like the iPhone’s mobile Safari browser, Opera Mini supports CSS3 media queries which lets you modify the style based on “media features”, which include among other attributes, height, width and color. In other words, instead of requiring that the device know that it’s a handheld (or in Internet Explorer’s case, that it’s *not* a handheld) in a boolean yes/no manner, CSS3 allows the publishers to design based on a device’s specific capabilities.

Time for Russell to add CSS3 into Mowser instead. Does the Blackberry browser frigging support display:none; yet?

Russell Beattie has written up a test for the Android OS:

Simple test: Will you be able to take the Android OS as it exists on Monday and hack it so it runs on an existing device? Will there be hacked Windows CE devices, or even the odd phone running the OS that day or within the week? That’s the supposed differentiator between Google’s offering and established mobile operating systems out there: Windows Mobile, Symbian, Moto’s Linux variant, the iPhone OSX variant, etc. None of these guys will let any joe just take their code and install it on any device they want, right?

I can’t wait for the 12th to get everything out there. Some people called the initial post vapor, and it was painful to hear as we knew it wasn’t the case.

I hope that developers are excited about the platform and what it has to offer. A lot of great work has gone into the system, and I think that it offers great APIs and a solid developer experience. We had to prove that out internally by building applications on it ourselves, and although it is early days, we are happy.

Now it is at a point where the entire community can develop, I am sure it will get a whole lot better in short order!