DS browser compliance

[gregdan3]

This is almost certainly out of scope for your blog, aha

But, a friend of mine pointed your site to me because you have that tag on the bottom that says it's "best viewed on the Nintendo DS Browser. Maybe"

I just spent a week or so making my site as DS browser compliant as possible, and it was genuinely super fun- if you're interested, I could give you a rundown. You can test it pretty quick by upping your site locally and connecting with MelonDS.

As a starting point:

• Opera 15 and Internet Explorer 11 are decent approximations of the target. Windows 11 secretly has Internet Explorer 11 still available if you look around (and it's not the mode in Edge), and you can still get old opera versions here.
• In addition to the constraints placed by those browsers, the DS browser doesn't recognize almost any semantic HTML, and throws out rules corresponding to them, presumably to save RAM (the console has 4MB and the option cart has 8MB). You can dodge around this unreliably by assigning a class to the unrecognized element (head, body, nav, article, main, footer) and styling that class, but the display rule still won't work in SSR mode- just replace the semantic element with a corresponding element that doesn't have the desired semantic.

Two notes tho:

• You'll probably give up on a lot of the amenities of your Astro development environment; tailwind in particular is a no-go since it
• Nobody will ever actually be able to connect your live site via the DS browser unless you also serve it via HTTP, since the DS's root CA cert is expired and irreplaceable, and the browser itself doesn't let you go to an untrusted site at all

[WessellUrdata]

I've just started working on this, and I've ran into the first roadblock: Cloudflare Pages will not do HTTP.

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/cloudflare-pages-sites-are-https-only/674248/4 https://community.cloudflare.com/t/serve-page-over-http/488539/2

and neither does GitHub Pages, as far as I can tell. https://stackoverflow.com/a/38934579

EDIT: Nope, I just have to add a custom domain

and I'm assuming GitLab Page wouldn't do as well. I'm fine with hosting the website on my own server, but that comes with a whole bunch of problems by itself (namely setting up CI/CD on my server, using something other than Caddy which would do automatic HTTPS and therefore unusable for DS browser), so it's gonna take quite a bit of time just to get that sorted out

I guess I'll be working on cleaning up CSS for the time being

[WessellUrdata]

Unfortunately, I've decided to abandon working on this issue for now since my priority is for the website to be performant and lightweight on modern browsers rather than for the DS Browser.

I might visit it some day, but who knows