iPhone and Web Compliance
July 29, 2007Recently, Apple released Safari for Windows to broaden their user base, and that of standards compliant browsers in general. At about the same time they released the guidelines for creating web pages that could be optimized for the iPhone.
They stressed the concept of conformance to web standards and the use of the simplier forms of enhancements, like javascript and CSS, rather than full blown Java or Flash applets. So, theoretically, we would have pages that are viewable on any modern browser and platform, including the iPhone.
For a long time there were articles complaining about the number of websites that could only be viewed properly using Microsoft Internet Explorer; while Firefox and Safari followed the rules, they couldn’t always display pages tested only for the cludgy Microsoft browser.
Now there is no excuse for lazy web developers who use IE as their primary browser not to at least see how their new pages would look in Safari, and then fix them so that they’ll look as good and be as functional — in any browser.
All fine and good — and yet… Now we are seeing lots of sites that look great in iPhone, and are geared towards the iPhone user, but try to look at them with the gold standard of compliance, namely Safari, and you get kicked right off.
What went wrong here?
