h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

We're having a conversation in PR at the moment about tables. Essentially, tables (and their data) can't be displayed in the PDA skin.

After the re-skin, will the PDA skin still be used? It has a number of flaws and this would be a good opportunity to phase it out. If it is going to remain, is there any plans to bring it up to speed on tables?
If it is remaining as is, it might be worth debating if we should be using tables in new EGEs. It seems unfair to block a portion of the users of the site.

Just some thoughts, really.

Hi Vip. You raise a very good point. Although, regarding tables, in truth we're not sure about weighting the content of Edited Entries according to how they appear in PDAs, as users who access the site with those devices are a comparative minority.

With regard to the PDA skin, our redesign will be passing through the scrutiny of GVL3 - the BBC's new global visual language for sites - which will make the site work much better on people's smart phones (the BBC Homepage has just gone through a similar process and has come on in leaps and bounds in terms of how viewable it is on all sorts of mobile devices). Once we've been through this process, we'll need to take another step to redesign the mobile version of the site accordingly. But this is not something we're looking at in this round of changes. Ultimately, however, this will probably supersede things like the PDA skin, although we're not there yet.

Yeah, it would be great if the new skin could replace pda. It wasn't great when it started out and it would probably take a lot more to fix than it would just to work with the new skin (especially since smartphones are a lot more sophisticated these days)!

Thanks for replying. It's nice to know that you guys are a step ahead of me!