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I'm writing a very simple page that is supposed to be viewed on mobile devices. While viewing it in the iphone simulator I noticed that the iphone browser automatically turns any number string into a link, supposedly for dialing it directly.
Problem is - there are a ton of numbers on my page that LOOK like phone numbers but actually aren't. Is there a way to tell the iphone browser to leave these numbers alone?
Very poor implementation on Apple's part (I hear this also happens on the iPad, where it makes no sense whatsoever), but there is a fix:
<meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no" />
One of the comments on that page also suggests the use of the controversial soft hyphen (­) to prevent auto-linking of a specific number (so the browser can still auto-link other numbers on the page).
If you want to link certain numbers but not others, I would personally use the format-detection meta tag to disable autolinking numbers, and then explicitly link the ones that are phone numbers:
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness">
<h1 itemprop="name">Foo Co.</h1>
<dl>
<dt>Phone</dt>
<dd><span itemprop="telephone"><a
href="<?php echo ($isMobile? 'tel' : 'callto') ?>:+15555555555">
555-555-5555</a>
</span></dd>
<dt>Client ID</dt>
<dd>1234567890</dd>
</div>
The PHP snippet is there to swap out the tel: scheme for callto: if it's not a mobile browser. This way Skype and other desktop VoIP programs can be triggered when the link is clicked.
­ to break up the number. What I would do is to disable iOS' Safari's auto-linking of numbers and then just explicitly indicate which numbers are actual phone numbers using semantic markup.
Sep 21 '13 at 0:01