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Phone Apps Will Soon Have Style

June 17th, 2007

Development for mobile devices will see a big change in style once the iPhone is released in a few weeks.

Currently, most mobile web sites are light in features and style mostly because of the size of the screen and the limited bandwidth on phone networks. Mobile sites often look a little too bland, boring, and are static in their nature since you can’t interact with the page elements. Part of this is due to any browser scripting support, and partly due to not being very usable considering the user interface doesn’t lend itself well enough to interact with page elements. Pages also have to be written with a limited set of HTML with poor to no CSS support. It’s like being back in 1996 when I surf the web with a phone.

Enter iPhone.

Last week at the WWDC, Apple announced quasi-third-party development using HTML/CSS/Javascript/AJAX through the mobile Safari browser. With this setup you can build a fully functioning web-based application without holding back on cool web 2.0 features. With a full set of tools and a fully standards compliant browser, mobile web apps are going to be wicked powerful. Take a look at this emulated site built with Javascript/CSS and the digg API. The iPhone will surely innovate the mobile web and without a doubt influence other phone manufacturers to build better web browsers. If this is any indication of where phone apps are going, I am looking forward to the future mobile web platform. What do you think, is this the next cool development platform?

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