"It's just Web programming"

[jducoeur]

If I hear one more statement that programming for the iPhone is trivial because it is simply Web programming, I am going to hunt Steve Jobs and put him down.

Let's be clear here: there is no such thing as "just" Web programming, at least if you're doing sophisticated stuff. Each browser is different in its quirks and characteristics -- the same code, executed on IE, Firefox and Safari, will generally perform a little bit differently on each. And the iPhone is more different than most: there are a lot of assumptions about UI built into Web programming that don't hold true for the iPhone. (For instance, the notion that "hover" means something, or the keycodes returned when the user presses "Enter".)

If you're building UIs for the Web, and you want them to be fancy, responsive and cross-browser, be prepared for real work on *each* target browser. While things still aren't as bad as the early days of the Browser Wars, it's still quite a black art.

(This rant brought to you by one too many facile comments online, poo-pooh'ing the notion that Apple needs to provide iPhone developers any technical support, since it's "just Web programming"...)

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Of course, he just wants you to have your app work in Safari. This should simplify your task immensely, while simultaneously robbing you of 94% of your market.

[hakamadare.livejournal.com]

robbing you of 94% of your market

are you referring to the 94% of iPhones that run some browser other than Safari? :)

frankly, i had figured that if someone were to write a “third-party app” for the iPhone, one would want it to be optimized specifically for the Safari on the iPhone, and in fact possibly not run at all under other browsers.

-steve

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Perhaps that's what Jobs wants -- but if I wrote a webapp to run on the iPhone, I'd want it to run on all similar phones, and be accessible through Firefox and IE on the desktop, to maximize adoption.

Unless it used some unique feature of the iPhone -- but it doesn't seem to have any particularly unique (accessible) capabilities, just a decent package for a bunch of normal ones.