8th
PPK has a good point and a bad point in his second tirade against iPhone developers:
The iPhone has become an obsession. If we don’t pay attention, we’ll have a mobile web that only works on the iPhone. And then we’ll have the real mobile web that wasn’t made by us and doesn’t give a shit about web standards and best practices. […]
Despite the platform having only 15% sales market share we all want our mobile websites to look exactly like an iPhone app and we only want to use iPhone features.
Rentzsch gets the bad point:
Mobile web developers, like most developers, are future-focused. We’d rather all mobile phones catch up with the iPhone we have in our pockets today, rather than bend over backwards to accommodate the current majority. When Koch damns developers for professional hypocrisy and incompetence, I see a quiet revolution of mobile developers waiting for other phones to catch up to the iPhone.
Of course, we developers want every user to use a browser that supports the full spectrum of standards. WebKit (on the desktop and mobile devices) is pretty much the best at this, though far from perfect. Designing for the standard, with HTML5 and CSS3, is a great way to make sure that your site looks great in the standards-compliant browsers, and works OK in the others. Targeting Mobile Safari is a great way to do this.
Here’s where PPK gets it right: every time a developer uses iPhone UI idioms — rounded buttons, striped backgrounds, arrow-shaped back buttons — they’re doing a disservice to users of other mobile devices. It’s the same problem that Mac users have when they complain that an application isn’t Mac-like; the developer isn’t paying attention to the ecosystem surrounding it. Designing your website for iPhone’s standard UI is fine if it’s only for the iPhone, but extending that UI to other mobile devices just ain’t right.
