

Web development is changing to meet mobile needs - rudenoise
http://www.joelhughes.co.uk/blog/2009/09/web-development-is-changing-to-meet-mobile-needs/

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haseman
All I can say, after several years of Mobile development, is: Thank God.

We've been relegated to the dusty corners of the consumer market for so long.
It's amazing to see the mainstream web services community catching on. Now we
mobile guys just have to keep up...

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rm-rf
I've always thought that building an iPhone specific version of a site is the
wrong path to take, and that site operators should create a mobile friendly
version that works on iPhones and other PDA/Mobile like devices. It seems to
me that for an approximately equivalent work effort, one can cover a handful
of mobile platforms instead of just one.

I'm especially annoyed when the sites iPhone version re-directs Opera Mobile
and Fennec browsers to the main site. A decision like that limits the
usefulness of non-Apple mobile users.

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masklinn
> It seems to me that for an approximately equivalent work effort, one can
> cover a handful of mobile platforms instead of just one.

As pretty much everybody who tried it discovered (and PPK is currently
documenting, see <http://www.quirksmode.org/m/table.html> and
<http://www.quirksmode.org/m/css.html>), while this is simple in theory it's
extremely difficult in practice, because there's much more variance within the
mobile space than within the desktop one (if you think 10 browsers --
including variants -- over 3 platforms is difficult, consider an order of
magnitude more on as many low-power low-perf platforms).

Even if you restraint yourself to fairly advanced phones (and don't have to
deal with WML, cHTML or XHTML MP) anything beyond basic (unstyled) markup is
risky.

Thank science the space is currently coalescing into either Webkit or Opera
browsers, but it's still a pain.

