David Emery Online

Mobile Web Standards

20 July 2007

Jeff Croft, who now works at Blue Flavor that has just released Leaflets, a iPhone launcher application, has posted a very interesting question on his blog:

“If the Apple SDK for iPhone development was Cocoa, rather than HTML/CSS/JS, would you still find it horribly offensive that the apps were made only for iPhone?”

This refers to the large backlash in the web standards world against the ever-larger amount of iPhone-only applications that are being produced at the moment. The issue – at its heart – is that we’ve all been trying to move away from only developing for one browser, and all the problems that brings, and instead focusing on web standards and cross-browser compatibility.

In other words, we don’t want another Internet Explorer situation, where a significant amount of web sites only work in IE.

The flip side is, though, that most – if not all – iPhone apps are using web standards, although they may be ones that both Firefox and IE don’t support yet. Which then means, I guess, that the issue is really about the interface design and user experience of iPhone apps; almost all of them try to replicate the native interface and hence provide a sub-optimal experience for anyone trying to use them on a different platform.

This really isn’t a problem, is it?

These applications (or sites, whatever you want to call them) are designed for the iPhone; in fact, most of them only make sense using them on the iPhone as they replicate and re-purpose content you can find elsewhere on the web. They don’t shut out people using different browsers (unless they use user agent string sniffing, which is altogether a different issue), unlike IE with ActiveX or their unique interpretation of CSS. In fact, it’s a much better situation then if we did have a real SDK.