A Real Mobile Web Browser?

Anyone who has even dabbled in web development has encountered the built-in problem of HTML, or HyperText Markup Language: it does not seperate content from presentation. It wasn't until CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and later XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) that it became possible to preserve content across presentation formats.

This built-in problem has been a weight around the ankles of web development for nearly the entire popular history of the Internet. So profound was its effect, often resulting in a given web site displaying perfectly on one browser and being broken beyond all belief on another, that it was once considered a necessity to maintain two completely different versions of the same web site in order to satisfy both halves (or three halves or four halves, or more) of the audience back in the days of the "browser wars."

A miniature version of this problem had re-appeared recently with the advent of web browsing on mobile phones. Unfortunately, with the limitations in screen size and memory, mobile phones required that web sites conform to these limitations in order to display correctly. The humorous part was that, almost to the minute most browsers began to support style sheets correctly so developers didn't have to build two sites any more, that eleventy-zillion new web clients appeared that required web developers to... guess what? Build two web sites: one for PCs and one for phones. A mobile compatibility problem! Now you can browse broken web pages from anywhere! Imagine the convenience!

Fortunately, this time, web developers were nearly unanimous in their response: no. The web works just fine, thank you very much. Displaying it on phones isn't that important. And so the buzzer sounded on the mobile Internet... until now.

One of the myriad phenomena announced at the recent Apple Keynote was the fact that a real web browser: Safari, had been installed on a mobile phone. Once again, the implications are enormous.

The benefits to users are obvious, but less obvious are the benefits for developers, and even less obvious than that, is the additional implied benefit for developers. The old mobile phone browsers reversed all the benefits provided by technologies like style sheets and XML. It was nearly impossible to do on mobile phones what had become necessary in web development everywhere else: seperate content from presentation.

But by installing Safari on their phone and incorporating technologies like multi-touch to overcome the limitations of the display size, Apple has, once again, provided a bridge between two technologies and thereby improved both while making things easier for developers. It is extraordinarily difficult to ask for more.

When the Internet, the real Internet, becomes available on a mobile device, it improves the value of everything and it affects everything. The implications for shopping alone are phenomenal, and this is without pointing out the iPhone's integration with Google Maps.

Now the question becomes: what else is possible here and what is the best way to build it? I'm fairly certain web developers are going to have quite a lot of fun answering that question, and that's what they should be doing.