iPhone mobile web / browser considerations, as a new/to-be mobile web designer.
There are many people out there who have been working with the mobile web and understand a lot more than me including [1] Barbara Ballard, [2] Brian Fling, [3] Luca Passani, [4] Andrea Trassati, [5] Cameron Moll So my points below are probably flawed by my limited understanding.

iPhone users experiencing some frustration with a mobile web page / application that is not being displayed in the iPhone browser as they would like. (probably been designed to try and support as many mobile browser/web design standards as possible). The iPhone is a new device but there have already been requests for separate iphone web pages etc

So what to do ?

Separate design for the iPhone - a separate iPhone web:
The iPhone is an attractive design, is aimed at the higher end of the market as a smartphone (world mobile using population is around 3 billion and growing and still only small% of those are smartphone owners). This is not likely to change drastically in the next year or so. If you pay a lot of money for your smartphone you want the best usability and the best browsing experience to justify your purchase. However the iPhone sales so far do not indicate that a large % of the world’s population are going to be using them (unless Steve Jobs is about to launch a 1 iphone per child initiative).

So can businesses justify the extra time and expense of web development, every time something is updated on their websites, to be redesigned for an iPhone and/or even to have a separate design for iPhone in the first place when other phones and PDAs (which sometimes have keyboards available on the screen for stylus etc) can display web pages without the need. Is it commercially viable ? I’m not sure at the moment.

For web designers and developers it is wrong in principle. CSS exists because it was recognised once you could start displaying colour, pictures, multimedia on websites, you could take all the formatting and display out of the html and put it in a separate web page known as a CSS stylesheet.The pages load faster as a result because the browser is not having to read and reload all the formatting when it receives the html page and when the user goes to different pages on a web site. So its better for both designers and users.

The web design/development work performed by W3C in creating standards for CSS and Xhtml has helped designers to design more consistently, therefore cutting down on the amount of design time required. However just simply writing web pages in Xhtml and using a CSS stylesheet will not ensure that it will display in all the main browsers - IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari etc

For mobile web this is even more complex because the different devices do not have the same browsers, the built in ones can vary across ranges and manufacturers. Opera Mini is one browser where web developers have tried to provide a browser that can display across more than one manufacturer or range.

Hacks
In pc web design, when formatting was removed from the html and put in the CSS, talented web developers and designers managed to find ‘hacks’ when different versions of browsers appeared such as the IE6 hack or Safari hack. This was a small piece of code added into a stylesheet to allow the browser to display something in a way it had not been originally designed to do. Its a workaround - a bit like a plaster to provide first aid solution but longer term, web design and development standards will need to specify a better answer.

In mobile web design, this is even more complex, as highlighted by many presentations at Future of Mobile last week. You can’t just put in an iPhone hack. In the meantime the iPhone users are disgruntled with what they perceive as an inferior browsing experience and web developers are equally disgruntled with yet another device browser to try and figure out.

Does than mean that iPhone users will stop using mobile web apps, widgets and therefore drive web audience numbers down, making those apps no longer commercially viable, or will iPhone users abandon their iPhones for web browsing and opt for a different device; and what is Apple doing about their lack of vision of this ?

This also has implications for mobile learning because even if mobile learning gets authored as compiled code it will need to run in a mobile web browser so does this mean every time create mobile learning, will have to create an iPhone friendly version or will iPhone learning just become completely separate, maybe then becoming only available to a limited audience.

Its depressing. Or maybe I’m missing something. Hopefully work into mobile web design standards will help resolve this, hopefully those manufacturers of unique devices can help fund the research required for this too.