When I first started this project to Marie Kondo HTML — I wrote some code that looked at the <meta> tags used by the 10000 most popular websites.
Of that 10000 only 6560 returned a result — and of those 460 had the HandheldFriendly <meta> tag:
<meta name="HandheldFriendly" content="True">
// 45 Bytes
If we unscientifically extrapolate from those numbers — that’s around 7% of websites using this tag — which is quite a lot, considering that it took days to work out what it does.
What is the HandheldFriendly <meta> tag?
The HandheldFriendly <meta> tag was invented for the AvantGo web browser.
AvantGo was used on Palm Pilots between 2000-2009.
This is a Palm Pilot:
It was more of an RSS feed than a browser.
If the HandheldFriendly tag wasn’t present AvantGo would remove <table> elements, “certain image tags” and JavaScript from from the page.
By using the…