Monday, October 8, 2007

iPhone: Killing or Redefining Web Standards?

The iPhone will be looked upon as the epoch of the truly mobile web. It doesn't support handheld media style sheets and tries to display web sites normally, as well as tailoring them to its lower resolution. The iPhone may destroy a Web standard or cause it to be redefined.

The World Wide Web Consortium has set up a number of different types of media on which a Web page can be displayed. Chief among them are the "screen" and "handheld" media. Desktop web browsers fall into the "screen" category and things like cellphones and PDAs fall into the "handheld" category. Handheld devices must adapt content designed for the screen media to their less capable displays.

Apple's Safari Web browser on iPhone isn't the first browser that attempts to display Web pages normally. Opera's flavors of mobile browsers do something similar. A while back, I believe around version 7 or 8 of its desktop browser, Opera in mobile mode would try to display a Web page how you'd see it on a desktop computer unless you imported a style sheet for the handheld media. This continues on today as "Small Screen Rendering" (SSR) and attempts to crunch a web page down in size to fit on a smaller screen.

This seems like a fairly sensible approach. The Opera browser is aware it's on a mobile or handheld device and supports hand held style sheets, but in the absence of hand held style sheets it does it's best to display a Web page not designed for a handheld device. Safari on iPhone basically claims it's a desktop browser. With a little additional markup you can change its behavior, and with a CSS3 media query you can feed that particular flavor of Safari a different style sheet. The common theme here is that mobile browsers, despite what the W3C might have imagined, try to be desktop web browsers first unless an alternative method of styling exists.

The emergence of a two-tiered Mobile Web

The World Wide Web Consortium envisioned the Web as requiring different styles based on the display capabilities of a device, but getting the same markup. Reality is panning out differently. Web page HTML has been a bitter soup of presentational markup garnished with sparse portions of meaningful tags for many years, and web browsers must display these pages. To make matters worse, most pages are designed for the screen media, or desktop Web browsers as they are more commonly known as. Browser developers seem to be taking one of two paths:

  • Attempt to display the Web page like a normal desktop browser would, and in the presence of some browser-specific markup, use styles catoring to the device. (Safari on iPhone).
  • If no handheld media style sheets are found, crunch, chew, and rearrange the page to fit the display of the device (Opera Mini and Mobile).

The mobile web is becoming two-tiered. This doesn't seem like something the W3C imagined would happen.

Upon reading that Safari on iPhone wouldn't support handheld media style sheets, I had to wonder if we'd be stuck in a mobile browser war similar to Netscape vs. Internet Explorer at the close of the last century. Looking into it further made me realize that both Opera's and Safari's compromises were out of necessity and shed light on how to realistically create a mobile Web. I'm not sure where the Web Standards explain how handheld browser developers should handle legacy Web pages or pages not designed for handheld devices, but the method for implementing handheld styles is starting to diverge. This could destroy cross-browser functionality, and presents a challenge to the industry on how to handle the non-mobile Web on mobile devices in a standardized fashion.

Even though Safari on iPhone is on a hand held device, there are many reasons that it shouldn't be thrown into the same lot as cell phone browsers. Screen resolution, processor speed, battery life and memory capacity are greater on iPhone, and therefore Safari is more capable. Opera has also divied up its handheld browser into Mini and Mobile versions assuming Mini will be on cell phones and Mobile will be on technologically beefier personal digital assistants and smart phones. Suddenly the notion of a "screen" and "handheld" web is blurred.

The multi-tiered mobile Web

In the coming months we may see a plethora of mobile devices with many levels of capabilities — screen resolutions, color depth, processor speed, memory capacity, plug-in support, battery life — all these things will improve, but at different rates and on different devices. How can we possibly design for a "mobile web" when we don't know what will be accessing it? Opera's implementation of mobile technology is closest to the spirit of the Web Standards when compared with Safari on iPhone, but design itself is resolution dependent. You need physical limits to implement good design. This is where iPhone's implementation makes the most sense.

On the iPhone, you use a CSS3 media query in which you specify the maximum resolution for the device, and you add a few META tags to your HTML. I don't believe this meshes well with Web Standards, but makes the most sense design-wise. The iPhone isn't "handheld" or "screen" or "print." It's got a maximum width of 480 pixels in landscape mode. We have 480 pixels of width to design with. Now we have a physical limitation. Now we can truly design effectively. Now there are no standards and we are open to conflicts between different devices and software platforms— precisely the situation Web Standards have sought to avoid. However, this makes the most sense for design.

There are too many levels of "hand held" or "mobile" devices to realistically mesh them together, and yet they aren't truly "screen" or "desktop" devices. They can't handle reams of JavaScript and dozens of images, but they can handle some. The W3C's media types have gotten us started. Now that we are seeing how the mobile web is developing, it's time to look back and choose a different metric on which to decide how to display content. Pixels count. The W3C has tried hard to make them count less, but in the end that's what really counts. We need a standard on how to decide which resolutions get which styles and functionality. I still don't want to write multiple versions of HTML on one Web site for God knows how many different types of devices when one version should suffice.

I've only just started down the path of designing and coding for the "mobile web," so I've got oodles more questions than answers.

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