A few days ago, I came across a post from a fellow named Mitch Cohen talking about how he’d made some changes to his site’s CSS to make it a little more iPhone-friendly. Essentially, he created a special CSS template that reorders how the site loads when browsing via an iPhone as per Apple’s online documentation. This is all pretty standard stuff, except for the second comment in the posting.
While the implementation is neat, and it’s good to see you trying out new ideas, I personally think what you are doing is HORRIBLE. The best feature of the iphone is to see the web as it is intended. This means full pages, all graphics, just as it appears on a regular computer… not a watered down WAP version. You’ve just taken all the work apple did and then you’re forcing a watered down ‘WAP’ version down the throats of people who spent money on an iPhone ( we could have gotten this watered down version from a windows mobile device.)
I understand this is a personal blog of yours, but trends get set very easily.. Before you know it, more people will be doing this, and then all the features of the iphone are wasted… sigh…
At the very least, put a link at the top to give users a choice on how they’d like to view your page….
just my .02
It’s sort of the same argument that people make against spoofing your browser’s user agent; by conforming to the lowest common denominator, you’re slowing the adoption of better standards. And as an oldschool Mac user, I’m well aware of the dangers of such an approach. But as I noted in the comments myself, if there was a way to auto-detect whether an iPhone user was connecting over EDGE versus WiFi, it would provide the best of both worlds; a lightweight page for EDGE surfing and a full-featured one for WiFi browsing.
If the iPhone really takes off, this will hopefully become something of a non-issue within one to two years, especially if other cell providers come up with browsing solutions as elegant (by comparison) as Safari for iPhone. WAP sites by and large suck, but the principle of minimizing a site’s load time and maximizing its layout efficiency works just as well for a “real” browser as for a mobile one. So even Mitch’s minimal tweaking has already benefited his regular users. There’s a lesson here somewhere.
(And yes, I bought one. More on that part later, of course.)
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