Mobile-Unfriendly Websites
Written by on November 16th, 2006 in Ajax News.
Phil Greenspun bemoans the difficulty of running modern web apps from his sidekick.
My Motorola/Windows XP phone began to die after two years. Wanting something that would let me keep in touch with friends over AOL Instant Messenger, I got a T-Mobile Sidekick. I was reluctant to get a non-flip phone, but so far I have only managed to make one unintended phone call per day. The Web browser is excruciatingly slow. I’ve found that most of the Web sites developed in the early 1990s work just fine. It is possible to log in, fill out forms, get results. What doesn’t work? The latest and greatest Web sites. They are too script-heavy. Programmers seem to have forgotten that although the average desktop has ever-greater capabilities, the average user is increasingly connecting from a handheld device. I tried using one of my students’ sites from last semester. They lifted some username/password code from a Ruby on Rails toolkit. It relies on JavaScript. The site is 100 percent useless from the Sidekick.
Have we proven that “the better the tools the worse the application?”
Seems unfair to blame Rails for this … Rails makes it just as easy to build accessible websites as it does to build pure-Ajax websites. Can you blame Ajax for this? Yes, a bit … it’s true that most web developers are more focused on delivering rich, interactive, experiences than making sites accessible from the mobile. In this example, it is indeed quite ridiculous that someone created a login page requiring Javascript. For more dynamic applications, though, it’s just not practical or worthwhile to make the site mobile-compatible.
Greenspun mentions that many early ’90s websites work quite well on the phone, but it must be said that many sites created in the late ’90s or early ’00s would work really poorly on the phone, because those were the times when many developers used Flash or Javascript for the sake of it (mmmm…cascading menus) and were oblivious to web standards. A major theme in many Ajax apps is to use well-known web conventions where possible, and augment them with dynamic behaviour where necessary. For that reason, many modern Ajax apps are actually more accessible than their equivalents from a few years back.
Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/mobile-unfriendly-websites