"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

[umbran.livejournal.com]

Devli's Advocating for the moment: maybe the intent was not to imply that it is easy, but that it was a problem of an already known class of tasks. As in, "you don't have to do anything more than what you do with web programming".

In physics and math, there's a common habit of noting when a problem fits into an already known class. If I look at a problem and say, "It's just orbital mechanics," I don't mean to say that the partial differential equations are easy, but I do mean that you can use the usual methods to deal with them.

[jducoeur]

I'm fairly sure that *was* the intent. Problem is, it's not really true in this case -- the iPhone is qualitatively different from all other browsers in some subtle but important ways, so the problem doesn't simply reduce to well-understood techniques. A lot of smart people are spending more effort than they ought to need to, in order to figure out those differences...