Ben Dodson skrev:
I don't personally have a problem with having iphone in a URL as it is generally used for applications that are very specific to the iphone.
It is 1998 and I am developing an application that is very specific to MSIE... A strategy proved bad!
IMO this is *exactly* the reasoning that J. Zeldman, Steve Champeon et al protested against. A protest that started and defined the web standards movement.
Yes, perhaps there should be versions for other devices (e.g. Nokia) but the reality is that most developers won't bother making specific sites for these users and instead use a generic mobile stylesheet.
No there should not be versions for Nokias or Sony-E's or LG's or any other device. What we perhaps need, though, is a graded browser support chart, like Yahoo has for desktop apps.
The difference with the iPhone is that it's the latest bandwagon in town and that the majority of iPhone owners will use the internet on the phone (whereas the majority of Nokia phone owners won't use the web browser on the phone).
The difference is that Nokia et al makes several different kinds of phones, not all are smartphones. Every single smartphone owner I know uses the web browser on the phone and has been doing it for quite a few years.
It is great that the iPhone has made people aware of the mobile web, and lowered the threshold for some to use it. But as developers we should not care about the present, but the present and the future! Locking ourselves in to one device is not a strategy for the future, even if iPhone shows up as the leading mobile device in usage stats today. Remember, there once was a time when MSIE was so dominant that as a web developer it made sense in many ways to develop MSIE only web sites!
It also has a very specific style and so companies will try and cater to this (e.g. the facebook web app was designed to look like a native iPhone application).
That I predict is a fad that will quickly go away. Site owners will soon see the benefits of designing for the brand of the website, rather than the brand of the device it is accessed from.
Of course, now there is the App store and the ability to run third party applications, I'm sure a lot of these iPhone specific websites will disappear as the developers move to offering a built in solution.
Hopefully you are right. Off topic: The fact that people will jubilantly welcome a solution that means they are getting locked in to a single vendor is also beyond my understanding...
And I am not a Mac hater. I use Macs (as well as Windows and Linux) and listen with delight to my iPod.
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