1 Thanks

Thanks for that interesting coverage of iPhones HTML and CSS capabilities. While the iPhone is not available in Europe yet, it’s good to be prepared.

Sometimes it may be necessary to have two versions of your website: one for web browsers and one for mobile devices. Even if your website is clean you might want to reduce the content for mobile devices and you even might to have a different page flow. The capabilities of mobile devices always increase and the iPhone might be a low end web browser or a high end mobile browser. So it’s ion between the two versions and you have to think how to cover it without making a third version.

posted at 07:31 am on August 28, 2007 by Kevin Hope

2 Excellent article

Thank you very much for this really interesting article!
So far when I designed a new website I wasn’t considering mobile phones and even just didn’t know that there are special tags for mobile browsers. But as the mobile internet is growing so quickly, it is in deed more and more important to think about the special problems of mobile devices.

posted at 10:33 am on August 28, 2007 by Peter Möller

3 Safari on iPhone is disappointing

I’m a bit disappointed by safari on the iPhone. I have owned the Nokia N770 for a long time now and it has an excellent version of opera installed. The new N800 has an even more advanced version, though both can handle css/javascript/flash. I have yet to find a website which can not be displayed. Although as developers we need to strive for perfection with our code, I think that mobile devices need to learn from Nokia and stop forcing users into a water downed version of the internet.

posted at 01:16 pm on August 28, 2007 by James Luterek

4 Embed

It depresses me that, after a brief discussion about web standards, the first code I see in the article makes use of the <embed> element. I’m also disappointed that the CSS media type of “handheld” is unsupported.

posted at 02:24 pm on August 28, 2007 by Simon Jessey

5 Mobile

Thanks for the insightful article Craig. I’m also disappointed by safari on the iPhone. James I agree “The new N800 has an even more advanced version, though both can handle css/javascript/flash.” I tested N800 and it’s really great, I like flash on N800 it looks very good. Nokia is the king od mobile devices for me!

posted at 02:27 pm on August 28, 2007 by Tom Green

6 iAgree

I think far too much attention is being given to the iPhone, especially with the issues presented here. When developing for a mobile platform, no one should be focusing soley on the iPhone. That would be about as presumptuous as only checking your site for IE compatability. What needs to be realized is that the reason the iPhone is important is that it is adding to the growing demand for content provided to the mobile web. While I have no problem developing a mobile-specific style, it is arrogant for anyone to assume that I’m going to waste my time developing for one specific device. There are enough incompatability issues already, we don’t need any more.

posted at 02:49 pm on August 28, 2007 by Aaron Chapin

7 Why not create different versions of your site for

If you follow the logic of this article, the only conclusion you should come to is that developers should go back to what we did years ago when we had to create different versions of our sites for different browsers and then but a notice on the site saying it’s been optimized for x browser. The purpose of creating standards was so we could design once for all browsers. Should we all start to limit the widths of our pages so people using an iPhone don’t have to scroll horizontally to see everything?

posted at 02:50 pm on August 28, 2007 by Richard Samela

9 Too bad about the flash video

The biggest downside with not supporting flash (in my opinion) is how much that limits web experiences that include video. From a developer standpoint, flash has certainly become the easiest way to deliver video. Does this mean that iPhone will only support websites that use Quicktime as their video plugin?

posted at 03:50 pm on August 28, 2007 by Greg Short

10 A lot of new users?

Craig, you wrote about the iPhone that “it will allow a lot of new users to experience the mobile web”. I think that is true if you just have a look at the absolute numbers. But there are billions of web users out there and the number of mobile web users is so small yet. Only the few more iPhone users will not make a difference. And even if they do you still have to get them onto your site. Will iPhone users find the iPhone enhanced web sites?

posted at 03:51 pm on August 28, 2007 by Adam Kay

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