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The mobile meta tag

    If you have ventured into the world of Mobile web development, you would have realized the importance of the viewport meta tag in the head section of your HTML page. Without the proper meta tag included in your HTML, your web page would zoom, move, be dragged around and basically not client acceptable. To avoid all of this, we need to include a viewport meta tag in the HTML in the head section.

    Jquery mobile suggests the users to use the following viewport meta tag.


<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0">

    By using the above viewport meta tag, the width would be set to pixel width of the device. This would avoid the resizing of the page and there-by the web page would not be draggable any more. However, this would not disable our zooming issue. The user can still zoom the web page by tapping the screen or by pinching it. Jquery mobile suggests that this is a feature that should be included, however, many a times, in most cases, this is not desirable. By using the above meta tag, your web page won't zoom when the device is in the Portrait mode, but when you change the orientation of the device the user can start zooming the web page. To avoid all of the above issues, the following meta tag should be used instead of the one suggested by Jquery Mobile.


<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no">

    The user-scalable=no property disables the zoom feature of all the mobile devices in both the orientations. Hope this post helps a lot of web developers who are or would have faced this issue. Do share the post if it has helped you and you can follow the blog by liking the Spatial Unlimited page on Facebook.

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