Today we had a meeting where somebody asked to have support for tablet and mobile devices. In principle you may think well it's just matter of tweaking a bit the CSS to make it work. Well actually it may look like that at first. But if you want to be sure that it will be usable from nearly all the devices, it may be actually harder. Also if you modify the layout to fit your needs, any further feature you may add later may actually either to be tweaked to also support mobile devices but may actually break the existing layout. Therefore it's not just matter of "we shall do it now" and then hope it will not cost on the overall, it will cost overall and you must actually think about it.
While for some of you supporting mobile is a must, here in my case it was a "nice to have" which somehow wanted to go on top of the to do list. It's not because it may look cool to run around with your tablet that you must push this request. You could also use notebooks which would actually solve other problems as well.
People simply fail to understand how must a request will actually cost in the long term and think that today such features should be pretty cheap if not free. I even heard yea but you could simply serve a different CSS based on the resolution of the device. WRONG! You don't receive the device resolution by default on the server side. That would mean also to have multiple CSS for the multiple devices, what a nightmare! And who does the testing on all those possible platforms?
At the end of the day what counts is really checking what is a "must" or a "nice to have" and see if the cost (even just as time to invest) is really well understood by the customer. If at the end of this evaluation the result is "yes we shall do it", then fine, but not just do it because somebody think it would be cool to have it so.
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