Wap site By CI

[eluser]-sek[/eluser]
My experience with the iphone (I have a used, unlocked one for development) is that Safari generally handles all modern websites. It can be slow and a few pages crash and cause a reboot, but for example, all the jQuery features on our site work fine in the iphone. The gestural navigation and zooming work very well for getting around a webpage, although it is a bit like holding your nose to a newspaper.

On the other hand, websites optimized for presentation on the iphone or other mobile devices, not WAP, but plain HTML made to fit the screen size and simplified to present information without a lot of clutter, are actually easier to browse than normal web pages. The iphone apps, such as the one for YouTube, are even simpler and easier to use than the optimized web pages and I much prefer accessing YT through the app than using Safari, since it is optimized to the handheld experience.

We are starting to realize the potential for mobile use on our site, which we planned form the beginning, so we are about to make the decision how to go about this. I would stay away from WAP. There are some who recommend not optimizing for mobile devices, because smartphone browsers are now capable of handling standard html and javascript. I disagree with this. A handheld device with a 3" touch screen is not a desktop and even with the assist the iphone gives, the browsing experience for YT is much better in an app optimized to the device. Scrolling around the screen of a regular website is a pain. I have to zoom in to read something, then zoom out, zoom in to click a tiny link, then zoom out to the page, zoom in to read, you get the picture. It does do fairly well reading column organized content. A double tap will bring the column to fill the width of the screen and then back to the page. I prefer to read the mobile version of Google news, which is optimized for iphone and other devices (as are some of the other big sites) over Safari. In fact, some of these sites, detect the mobile device and do not let you browse their regular site in Safari, even though it is fully capable of handling it.

If you are optimizing for iphone, you will want to read about how to fit the content to the viewport

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/librar...Phone.html

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/librar...wport.html

I am toying with developing an iphone app, but may present some of our site information through a mobile optimized HTML version of our site.