As I was doing some digital purging over the holidays, I took a look at the site for a couple of updates I've been planning for a while. I was looking at the templates used to generate the site's HTML and found a few lines of code I didn't recognize:

<!– http://t.co/dKP3o1e –>
<meta name=“HandheldFriendly” content=“True”>
<meta name=“MobileOptimized” content=“320”>
<meta name=“viewport” content=“width=device-width, initial-scale=1”>

The website uses Pelican as the HTML generator for the site. The code snippet I found was in the article.html Pelican template used to create all the HTML pages for the individual articles.

Towards the bottom of the template are the 4 lines of code I didn't recognize.¹ I thought the link included in the comment section would give me some insight.

But that led to a dead end. Since that didn't lead anywhere, I started to do a little searching and found a match:

Include a < META NAME="HandheldFriendly" content="True" > tag in the head element. This is your way of telling AvantGo that you've optimized your page for being viewed on a handheld device. Without it, tables, JavaScript and certain image tags won't be registered. AvantGo Style Recommendations:

So at some point in the development of the site I thought it was important to make sure Gen 1 mobile phones could properly render my website.

Ummm... maybe it's been a while since I looked at the background tech running things around here.