Comments on: 3 Reasons Apple’s New iPhone Promotes Better Markup

By: Brett Derricott

Brett Derricott — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 21:17:38 +0000

@Kris: I sure hope that doesn’t happen…the last thing we need is a situation where we double the number of hacks we already have to use to work on multiple devices.

@Bill: Yes, with Safari on the iPhone you’d think it’d be possible to eliminate the requirement for a handheld-specific stylesheet. I can still see a desire for a separate stylesheet in some cases just to tailor the content to the smaller viewport.

@Michael: Very true, my friend. I did oversimplify a bit there! With semantic markup controlling the structure and CSS controlling the presentation, designers/developers can tailor the same content for different devices as you’ve pointed out. Thanks.

By: Michael Mulvey

Michael Mulvey — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 21:56:41 +0000

Regarding your comment:

“That means everyone will be making phones capable of a more robust handheld browsing experience, further increasing the desire of web designers and developers (and their clients) to make websites that look good on all devices.”

You can’t make a site that will look good on all devices. You can structure your HTML and CSS so that pages render well or adapt well, but if you’ve ever visited Yahoo! or Google on a Treo, for example, you’ll know that they feed a different version of their site to those devices.

Again, it just goes back to the idea of separating structural markup from content.

… hopefully this is what you meant. In which case I agree.

By: jbelkin

jbelkin — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 00:13:31 +0000

find a place where the phone “roams” – make lots of calls, they will drop you

By: BIll W.

BIll W. — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 17:11:31 +0000

I agree with everything you’ve said, but doesn’t the fact that the iPhone uses a fully functioning Safari browser sort of imply that media=”handheld” stylesheets aren’t really necessary if other devices begin to implement real browsers into their devices?

By: J-One

J-One — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 15:29:46 +0000

Nokia phones allready come with opera9 browser which is also full featured. Its also aviable for Windows Mobile.

By: Kris Gosser

Kris Gosser — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 05:32:02 +0000

Or, the knock-off competitor products will end up producing their own browsers (and not using Opera, Safari, Mobile FireFox, etc) which will throw yet MORE types of hacks needed to be used.

That’s what I think will happen, and it saddens me.