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The Sad State of the Mobile Web
snydeq writes "Despite being the much better development platform for today's smartphones, open Web standards still face an uphill battle on mobile devices, Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister writes, noting that here, as on the desktop, the main hurdle is scalability. But whereas successful Web development for the desktop is a matter of scaling up, mobile Web development calls for applications that can effectively scale down as well — an imperative that is fast making the state of the mobile Web 'even sadder,' McAllister writes. 'The more that modern Web applications take advantage of the new client-side technologies available in desktop browsers, the more the divide between the desktop Web and the mobile Web widens.' As a result, developers are forced to fall back on basic Web technologies — a tactic that too often translates simply into writing separate UIs for mobile users. 'The result? Mobile Web applications are in pretty much the same boat as they were when the first WAP-enabled handsets appeared: two separate development tracks, one for the desktop and one for mobile.'"
Is this really true anymore? With devices like the Nokia N900 being released, that has full-featured browsers that can handle everything a desktop browsers can, I doubt this will be an issue much longer.
Posted by a Debian GNU/Linux user
None of those programs even have a core that's close to being mobile enabled, and no one using them is going to create one. I think the largest problem is simply that the tools most people use for their websites are too bloated, complicated and poorly written to create an effective mobile web.
For example, I have a client that I just last week had to broach the subject of a mobile enabled version of their Joomla 1.5 site with. They were adamant that a version that cellphones could use was absolutely important, but because of the HUGE framework Joomla uses, and the relatively small number of functions a mobile version would need to perform, I basically opted to build a very tiny CMS that would mirror the data from the Joomla database.
You may thumb your nose at web developers who create ridiculous sites and clearly don't know what the hell they're doing, but you are only displaying your own ignorance. Clients drive website development, not developers, and for the vast majority of clients mobile web is something they just don't care about. And because of that nearly all of the tools available exclude the mobile web.
As a web developer, I rarely have to touch the subject of the mobile web, and when I do I basically have to present my clients with two options: 1. you pay me a non-trivial sum to create a second version of your site just for the mobile web or 2. you are restricted to sites built in tools which are mobile web enabled.
I can tell you from years of experience, unless it's part of their business model clients go for option 3: fuck the mobile web.
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