Question

I’m the processing of redesigning a website that uses hover effect on a button (like button images changes when you put your mouse over it and when you click it, it goes to a different page).

Now that works fine if you’re on a a desktop/laptop computer. But on a tablet, the hover/onmouseover effect does not work. On a tablet, when clicking the button image, it changes briefly and then immediately goes to a new page.

What are methods and techniques where a website can detect if a visitor comes from a tablet or not? Then would it be possible to switch to a tablet CSS version? Or, are there tablet framework (i.e. Modernizer?) that can help with this process?

Answer 1

You could identify the iPad (or mobile device) simply by checking the User-Agent parameter of the browser.

In PHP for example you could do something like:

if( strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],'iPad') ) { // Add custom iPad CSS }

If you want to get it further you could use WURFL (http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/)