In these times of web standards advocates speaking the message of cross browser compatibility and not tying site to specific browsers or devices, why, why, WHY, are people suddenly busying themselves with making iPhone optimised versions of their services?

37signals have been doing it (in fact, I find that fairly hypocritical of them, and have stopped bothering with their blog feed), Blogline have just done, and a quick search on Google for [iPhone optimised] brings up a slew of pages about this very thing.

Why are we making the same mistakes with mobile phones that we made with desktop browsers?
There are other, usable, functional, more prolific mobile browsers out there.  Yet suddenly the iPhone, which is meant to just use Safari, requires special attention, extra effort to make web sites look nice on it.

I really don’t understand this.  If you’re going to make a mobile optimised version, ok.  If you’re going to tweak your site so it works better on mobile phones as well as desktops, fine.  But making sites specifically designed for the iPhone?

Come on people, lets have sites and web apps designed so they can function on my desktop, my Opera Mini phone, my housemates Wii, the Apple fanboys iPhone’s all at the same time.  I’m not about to start making a new web site for individual devices now, after spending so much time trying to get people to build them without those restrictions.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 12:53 pm and is filed under Hardware, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.