I think they used separate style sheets. Going way back in time, to the early days of smartphones and back when non-smartphones had mobile web browsers, most websites would serve either a separate style sheet that gave a simplified layout for tiny screens or even an entirely different, simplified page. Early adopters to mobile browsing tended to hang on to that separation much longer than newer sites that took advantage of CSS that could adapt to the screen size.
Comment on Wikimedia sunsets separate mobile domains
underline960@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Sincere question: Why was there a separate mobile domain in the first place?
jqubed@lemmy.world 4 days ago
paraphrand@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Yeah, this is a remnant of Wikipedia supporting mobile devices really early.
kent_eh@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
mobile web browsers, most websites would serve either a separate style sheet that gave a simplified layout
A simpler layout and usually a more lightweight page in general because mobile data eas slow and expensive back then.
If someone wanted people to actually use their site on the go, they had to make it load quickly and not cost $5 worth of data doing it.
jqubed@lemmy.world 2 days ago
That’s a good point; modern pages would choke our old 2G/3G plans!
Chronographs@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Honestly I generally prefer the desktop sites and just zooming in than mobile sites that tend to badly fit everything on the screen.
echodot@feddit.uk 2 days ago
Most mobile browsers will let you force desktop mode. So if you want to you can do that.
McDonald’s mobile website is especially bad with folding phones (first world problems) so I have it constantly enabled for that site.
Chronographs@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Yeah and I do but it often doesn’t respect the setting.
HeartyOfGlass@piefed.social 4 days ago
That was pretty standard for a while in web design - traditional "desktop" sites need a radically different layout when viewed from a smartphone, so from the dev side you'd check the size of the screen & redirect the user to the right subdomain for their device.
Nowadays it's not really necessary.