Safari® and WebKit Development for iPhone® OS 3.0

Chapter 12. Enabling and Optimizing Web Sites for the iPhone and iPod Touch

Oh, the irony. On the same day that I began writing a chapter on enabling Web sites for iPhone and iPod touch, I realized firsthand the frustration of browsing sites that just don't work with my iPhone. My boys and I were watching the third quarter of a Monday Night Football game when the electricity suddenly went out because of a town-wide outage. Because my son's favorite team was playing, he was frantic. What's happening in the game? Are the Titans still winning? I immediately pulled out my iPhone and confidently launched Safari in search of answers. But upon going to NFL.com, I discovered that its live updating scoreboard is Adobe Flash media. I was left with a gray box with a Lego-like block in its place. I then pointed the browser to the official Tennessee Titans site, only to discover useless Lego blocks scattered across its front page as well. We then spent the rest of the outage scouring the Web, looking for a sports site to help us.

If you manage a Web site, the iPhone introduces a whole new way of thinking in the design and development of a site. In the past, you could design a minimalist, text-only style sheet for mobile users — fully expecting your normal Web site to be viewed only by desktop browsers. However, expectations of iPhone and iPod touch users are not so modest. They are expecting to view the full Web in the palm of their hands. Therefore, as you design and develop your Web site, you ...