Samsung Mobile Browser 3.0 and forms

I have spent quite some time on the Samsung Z107 which runs the Samsung Mobile Browser 3.0 and I have to say that this browser is NOT full featured.

It is said to support xHTML-MP, but this is not entirely true. It does render xHTML pages and supports some extra tags such as the “format” attribute as I described in my previous post, but then has some features that I would have lived much better without!

Prepare a page with your head, title and body. Put an image in a p tag and then create your form. You can use a div tag or a fieldset, or whatever you like and then your good old submit button. The use of GET or POST methods is not influent.
If you use the Content type for HTML (text/html) or xHTML-MP (application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml) and the phone will show you the logo ONLY. If you click the left softkey (options in English) a special item appears labelled “Accept”, if you click it you will see the form fields.
If you use the content type for xHTML Basic (application/xhtml+xml) magically the page will be rendered all together and look much nicer (even if you haven’t changed anything at all).
While xHTML basic is not supposed to support forms, selects and other elements, even if you use the normal DTD, these elements will work fine.

Another thing? Using the xHTML Basic content type the device will also accept part of your CSS, but don’t forget that you can use only *1* external CSS file (or better write it inline).

Another thing? This is really strange. Setup a page with a select with, let’s say, 3 elements. None of them is selected, but of course the first one is automatically visualized to the user. If you don’t open the select and simply click on “submit” or open the select, pick the first item and click on sumbit, the browser will pass an empty value! But you add a selected=”selected” to the first item it will work even without opening the dropdown and picking that element.

Using the xHTML Basic content type you should use the CSS property to define the format of an input field (style=”-wap-input-format:’*N'”) while using the xHTML-MP content type you should use the format attribute (as I was suggesting in the other post; consider this an update!).

Oh well, back to work and testing