Not that long ago I wrote in praise of 37signals’ ta-da list, . I still think that that’s pretty cool, but now that I’ve learned that Google has created an iPhone-specific search interface and that other websites are creating iPhone versions, I’m rethinking that position.
One of the big selling features of the iPhone is that you’re getting the real web on its browser, not the crippled, practically useless version that many mobile phones give their users. Which is a desperately needed improvement and I’m glad to have it. But this trend of customizing sites for iPhone could lead us to other problems, problems we’ve faced before and were just starting to overcome.
One of the basic tenets of web development is that the sites you build – if you build them right – should display and work as close to the same way as possible across all browsers. The web is supposed to be an open medium viewable in any standards-compliant tool.
That hasn’t, of course, stopped web developers and companies from building sites that are “best in Internet Explorer.” Those kinds of sites are bad for many reasons, including that they violate basic web development principles and exclude large audience chunks for no good reason.
Making sites for iPhone isn’t much different than making them for Internet Explorer or making specific mobile versions. If you make a site the right way, you should only really need to make it once (making allowances from some tweaks to make it work on tricky browsers like IE, of course).
Making different sites for different browsers not only makes the web more expensive from the development side, it also makes it less open, less of shared experience. Which doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.
We’ve made a lot of progress on this front in recent years and sites specifically designed for one browser or another are increasingly rare and looked down upon in the web development world. It would be a shame if the iPhone reverses that trend.
