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Using Web Standards To Develop For Mobile Devices (Not Just The IPhone)  By
Karl LongI've been an avid Mac user for many years, since about 1996, and actually that's when I started working on the web. Needless to say i've been at the sharp end of peoples decisions as to "what platform to develop for". When IE and windows were the dominant web platform numerous useful services were blocked to me due to people thinking it's cheaper to develop for the majority. Thankfully with the help of people like Jeffrey Zeldman and the Web Standards Project more and more people are developing code for standards as opposed to platforms. Developing for web standards means it will work well enough on pretty much every platform that understands web standards, and then you can invest a bit more into "targeting" a specific platform to take advantage of a specific platform. And yet, these same people who are developing in web standards for browsers have suddenly forgotten all that good practice when it comes to developing for mobile.
I mean seriously, I know the iPhone is cool, and has a safari based web browser, but so do most of the Nokia Nseries right (yes, they had safari based web browsers before the iPhone was out)? So all you web 2.0 folks developing iPhone web applications, just remember if you just use web standards they can work for a lot more people. Take a look at this graph of activity on flickr for the iPhone and the top 3 Nseries devices: (click to enlarge)  (the # of Members is the amount of people who uploaded at least 1 photo the previous day) This is not supposed to provide accurate market data, but as you can see there are a lot of people out there in the web 2.0 world with Nokia Nseries so it just makes business sense right? Believe me I'm not doing this to pump up Nokia, I'm just tired of mobile apps not working on my N95 :-) Here's a list of the Top 25 web applications for iPhone Full disclosure yes I work for Nokia, but this is a personal plea. Comments
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