HTML Guide for device-width

To query for the size of the viewport (or the page box on page media), the width, height and aspect-ratio media features should be used, rather than device-width, device-height and device-aspect-ratio, which refer to the physical size of the device regardless of how much space is available for the document being laid out. The device-* media features are also sometimes used as a proxy to detect mobile devices. Instead, authors should use media features that better represent the aspect of the device that they are attempting to style against.

The width media feature describes the width of the targeted display area of the output device. For continuous media, this is the width of the viewport including the size of a rendered scroll bar (if any).

In the following example, this media query expresses that the style sheet is only linked if the width of the viewport 768px maximum:

<link rel="stylesheet" media="only screen and (max-width: 768px)" href="styles.css">

To query for the size of the viewport (or the page box on page media), the width, height and aspect-ratio media features should be used, rather than device-width, device-height and device-aspect-ratio, which refer to the physical size of the device regardless of how much space is available for the document being laid out. The device-* media features are also sometimes used as a proxy to detect mobile devices. Instead, authors should use media features that better represent the aspect of the device that they are attempting to style against.

The width media feature describes the width of the targeted display area of the output device. For continuous media, this is the width of the viewport including the size of a rendered scroll bar (if any).

In the following example, this media query expresses that the style sheet is only linked if the width of the viewport is greater than 768px:

<link rel="stylesheet" media="only screen and (min-width: 768px)" href="styles.css">