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.'"

Comments

I have a better idea

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:I have a better idea

[drinkypoo]

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've never looked at any of those, but with Drupal it's fairly trivial to create an acceptable mobile experience.

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.

You're being a stupid ass. I'm talking about shit like using javascript on a link that just opens a new page, when an HREF would have done as well and can be manipulated by JS through the DOM. I'm talking about shit like using flash for rollover links. I'm not talking about shit like google docs, which can reasonably be expected to fail on castrated browsers. The vast majority of websites out there would work fine on a mobile browser if they simply made intelligent use of CSS, and less unnecessary use of javascript. Every time I have to have javascript to submit a form that results in a page load anyway, I know that somewhere out there a big fucking idiot designed a website. Every time I have to load a flash movie to navigate a website, the web dies a little.

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.

Again, in Drupal it's simple enough as having a mobile theme, using one of the many canned methods available to make sure that mobile users get to see it, and you're done. Since mobile browsers are simple, mobile themes are simple, and it's little extra work. This is part of the whole point of using a CMS, and if yours doesn't let you trivially support displaying ordinary content to mobile devices then it's pathetic.