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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.'"
Use CSS as it was meant to be used, and stop using javascript and flash where they are unnecessary, and your sites will work just fine on mobile devices. Oh, that's hard? Sorry, your crap tools which produce shit code you don't understand don't impress me.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
No matter how you package it, a text-based website cannot be read conveniently on a postage-stamp sized screen. You spend all your time scrolling the text sideways, and up and down. All this gets in the way of your main aim, which is to get the information on that site. This presumes (falsely) that a usable proportion of the mobile device's screen is not taken up with banner ads, or visual embellishments which simply get in the way. Mobile web is fine for sites that just have a couple of lines of information and maybe a single icon and a link, but for anything more complex you need a screen at least 1024*768 and at a physical size where the letters can actually be read at that resolution.
Since the web is still (and probably will alway be) text based - as this is the best way to achieve a reasonable density of information, mobile users just have to accept that a "massive" 3 inch display just won't hack it. For example, cut a small rectangle out of a piece of paper that covers your whole screen. Now try and do any meaningful work through that hole and you'll have ripped it away within minutes. That's the problem with mobile devices, they're just not big enough to get all the information you need to be displayed at once.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
except for the flash based ones, slashdot is the most annoying to navigate on my iphone
Slashdot is one of the worst for the mobile web. When I try to read slashdot on my blackberry (peal 8120) not only does it not render, it crashes first the browser and ultimately the phone itself. Just simply trying to load slashdot leaves me needing to pull the battery from my blackberry to execute a hard reboot.
Last time I asked, CmdrTaco's response was that slashdot is not concerned about development for mobile devices.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Anything that puts the brakes on flash only websites is a good thing in my opinion. I just wish that there were more users of phones that supported HTML really well but didn't do Javascript so that there would be more pressure on web developers to make their pages accessible.
It seems to be an overwhelming human tendency to put form above function and the only thing preventing web developers from tying everything up in an impenetrable Gordian knot is the ever smaller number of old computers and phones that they might grudgingly spare an occasional though on.
Personally I wish browser plugins had never been invented. I've got a video player, a PDF reader, and all sorts of other applications and my browser knows how to launch them just fine. It annoys me every time some "clever" web developer finds some new way to force my computer to open a PDF inside my browser with restricted controls instead of dispatching it to my PDF reader with full functionality.
When phones catch up fully with modern desktops it may well signal the end of the open, accessible, web. The "professionals" would sure like to make the web just another version of TV where they control everything and our only choice is to use it their way or turn off the set.
This is an important debate, but Neil McAllister's article suffers from a number of problems. For example, it references the recently popular Webkit Comparison Table along with Peter-Paul Koch's claim that there is no “WebKit on Mobile”. The article didn't point out that some people like Alex Russel have dug deeper and have found that the facts don't support PPK's conclusions as strongly as one might think. Yes, if you include lots of older devices, there's quite a divergence in Webkit deployments, but what PPK and Neil McAllister don't say is that compatibility is much better on devices that ship recent versions, it's especially good for core features, and it's improving all the time.
McAllister also implies that the mobile Web is in trouble because "On my BlackBerry, JavaScript performance is abysmal". Using that argument, I can prove that Windows will never be successful, because I could in the early days show you PC's that ran it with abysmal performance. The potential of technologies like Javascript needs to be evaluated using the best implementation you can find; that shows what's possible. He does go on to say: "And even when a handset vendor does improve JavaScript performance, as Apple did with iPhone OS 3.0, it's a relative increase." Aren't they all? "You're still dealing with a poky handheld processor (and in Apple's case, one that developers speculate is too feeble for Flash or Java)." Uh, so now the reason that the HTML and Javascript will fail is that ARM processors are too slow to run Java? What's the connection I'm missing? The fact is, that there are some pretty good AJAX sites for mobile, so we know the ARM processors are good enough to run that Javascript. Try, for example, going to http://www.gmail.com using Safari on your iPhone. Not a usable experience? Even works offline using HTML 5 local storage (not Gears). Also, even if Javascript performance were somehow related to Java performance, I bet the Android folks would like to hear that Java doesn't run right on ARM processors, since the entire upper level infrastructure of Android, including user applications, is built on just that combination (as optimized using the Dalvik VM).
Unfortunately, articles like this can do real damage. Many people who are not expert in these things are struggling to figure out which mobile application development models are going to be workable. I happen to believe that the Mobile Web will, like the desktop embodiment of the Web, grow as disruptive technologies tend to: from something that's a bit shaky at first to the model that dominates? Why? Because unlike Mr. McAllister, I believe that the underlying processors and system technologies are capable of running it, and the value of a model that is fully cross-platform, can support zero install operation (you might want to install a mapping application to find a restaurant, but you almost surely don't want to install the restaurant's application to read menus or get discount coupons), can also scale to support installable applications (Widgets) and offline operation, is compelling. Furthermore, as has been the case for years, the Web has the unique value of allowing you to link to the over 1 trillion Web pages, without jumping out from some proprietary application container to a Web browser. Whether I'm right about the likely success of the mobile Web or not, this whole question deserves a much more careful analysis than McAllister's article provides. Unfortunately, there will be many people who read it and jump to the conclusion that the mobile Web is failing. A shame.