Apps vs. the Web

by Craig Hockenberry

Pull the iPhone out of your pocket and look at the home screen. Likely, you’re seeing some well known brands on the web: Facebook, Flickr, and Google to name just a few. You’ll also see companies like Amazon, Target, and Walmart which sell a lot of products via the web.

Like you, these sites and companies know how to build an effective website using the latest and greatest web technologies. The iPhone’s Safari browser also supports HTML5 markup with CSS3 styling and is powered by a fast JavaScript engine. So why is there a proliferation of apps instead of web pages that can do the same thing?

Longtime A List Apart readers may remember the Put Your Content in My Pocket articles I wrote soon after the iPhone launched. Recently, I published a book that explains how to create products for the iPhone App Store. With this article, I’d like to share my experiences with both mobile web and software development to guide your future developments on the iPhone platform.

Apple <3 standards

From Apple’s point of view, iPhone OS and web technologies share equal footing. When you visit their developer site, the Safari Dev Center is prominently displayed. The iPhone gets all the press, but when you click on Safari Dev Center, there’s a ton of great information that explains how to use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on an iPhone.

When you look back on your first experiences with the iPhone, one app stands above the others: The Safari web browser. Suddenly you were free from a mobile internet full of crappy CSS support or dumbed down presentation-like WAP. The iPhone’s real browser and the fact that it was in your pocket changed how you used the web.

Apple continues to invest heavily in the development of the WebKit browser engine used in Safari on the iPhone, Mac, and Windows. The result is a browser that excels in HTML5 and CSS3 support.

Apple also views HTML5 support as an important part of its marketing message for both consumers and developers.

Because it’s open source, the WebKit rendering engine also powers browsers for many other mobile platforms. If you’re surfing the web with a Blackberry, Android, or Symbian phone, you’ll find that your content looks just as good as it does on the iPhone. The only holdout is Microsoft’s Windows mobile platform which uses a browser based on the IE rendering engine.

With great HTML, CSS, and JavaScript support, developers are doing amazing things with the iPhone.

My comments about this article, by Eric Cleveland.

This article, apps vs the web touches on the issues we can have as companies dispute witch technology we should use on hand held phones to tablets. That is why standards need to be set for witch technologies everyone can agree on, so we as web designers can develop and design for all devices without creating separate designs for each device. Oh, excuse me I got dreaming there for a minute or maybe a little thought crossed my mind that sounded to simple. HTML5 and CSS are coming along way to solve these issues. Thank goodness that we are trying to reach some type of common ground to help web developers, by creating a format like HTML5 with CSS so we can design internet content for many types of devices. These types of issues need to be addressed and we as web designers need to take a stand or roll over and design our web pages four different ways if we want are pages viewed. We have come a long way in a couple of years with the introduction of the Ipad2 and many other devices coming out quickly to compete in this electronic race. I believe Applications (Apps) do have a place in this digital age. Nothing is like a good application that can help you accomplish your task quickly, even viewing a web page in a browser and accessing all the content you what on the web. What a world we live in, I can't even believe how quickly we went from books and newspapers to web and handheld devices with all the content at our figure tips. Libraries are something of the past, I believe maybe even one day that will disappear. Why you say, well when was your last time you went to a library? Or did you access what you needed on the web. I still buy paper books that I use a lot for referencing how to code HTML or CSS, but I am using the web more and more to answer the same questions I find in my books and even sometimes faster online than thumbing through the book. Oh, and I purchase the books online to.