Valhalla Island

For years we’ve had the web on mobile devices. PDAs, mobile phones and the like. All slightly different, not really showing the web how it looks in a desktop web browser and not really showing it dumbed down, stylesheet-less. There’s millions of these devices out there and have been for years and years. Bear with me, I’m getting to a point.

Occasionally big websites or sites targeted at working on mobile devices would create little m.website.com or wap.website.coms that were optimised for mobile display, but it was never common. The best thing you could do for the least work, in my opinion, was send a blank stylesheet the the handheld media type. Default styles applied on semantic markup, not all that bad. But still, the use of a handheld media type isn’t all that common.

I don’t have figures or statistics to back this up, it’s all just conjecture based on the general vibe I get. Pretend I have solid data to back my claims up.

So, despite mobile web browsers year’s of inferior capability rarely would a website provide anything dedicated either in the way of a dedicated website or alternate stylesheet for the millions of these mobile internet devices.

Then iPhone with Safari comes along. A mobile device finally capable of displaying websites in all their full-size, desktop style glory. A mobile device that’s been on sale for 19 days kicks off a massive slew of iPhone optimised websites. For years we ignore support for mobile devices that display the web differently to desktop browsers yet the moment a mobile device is released that does display the web as it’s seen on a desktop browser, it’s a mad dash to create specialised versions of websites for it.