[LINK] The iPhone marketing honey pot...

Fri Jul 11 21:54:43 AEST 2008

On 11/07/2008, at 9:28 PM, Rick Welykochy wrote:

> Ivan Trundle wrote:
>
>> Most sites written properly need NO optimisation at all - though  
>> it  does help to add a single line to allow for scaling...
>
> That really is one of the design goals of HTML. It "streams" across
> a page of *any* width and the designer can tell the HTML when to break
> a line if really necessary.

Not what I was referring to, Rick (though I agree with you entirely).  
Here's an example of what I mean:

<meta content="width=device-width; initial-scale=0.7; maximum- 
scale=2.0; user-scalable=1;" name="viewport">

The idea here is to allow user-scaling with ease (highly relevant to  
multitouch devices), and to set how much scaling can be applied in the  
viewport.

And for good measure:

<body onload="setTimeout('window.scrollTo(0,1)',300)">

...allows the fullscreen of the device to hide the toolbar and only  
display the html, if the html fills the viewport.

However, even without these, any well-designed web page will work  
smoothly on the iPhone/iPod Touch. The inbuilt browser (Safari) is  
well ahead of any other mobile device browser, including Opera.

On the other hand, there are guidelines from Apple which specify ways  
to make the multitouch (as opposed to using a mouse or stick/pointer/ 
pentip etc) experience work better for web pages. This is not trivial,  
since a touchscreen that relies on fingers and thumbs demands a  
different display (which contradicts my initial agreement with Rick),  
whereby buttons and links are made easier to select without lots of  
zooming.

If you're interested, all of the inside info is here:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/

At first, I shunned the idea of developing web code for a single  
device, but there is a certain elegance in what is being delivered in  
'iphone-optimised' websites, and given that I browse the web at least  
50% of the time in Safari's mobile browser (using an iPod Touch), I  
can appreciate the usefulness of the coding. But it won't please  
everyone.

Cheers

iT