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iPhone Browser Capabilities and Guidelines

University of Washington's Emerging Technology group published notes from Apple's Developing Web Sites for iPhone session from WWDC last week. The blog entry provides some interesting information for users and web developers alike about the iPhone's capabilities, and has been summarized below.

Apple listed what the iPhone offers for websites:

Removed per Apple's request


A few iPhone size limitations / restrictions are noted in developing for the iPhone:

Removed per Apple's Request


Apple recommends the following design considerations:

Removed per Apple's Request


Apple's iPhone comes out on June 29th, 2007. At WWDC, Apple announced that Web-based applications will be the only way for 3rd party developers to produce applications for the iPhone.- 10MB max html size for web page
- Javascript limited to 5 seconds run time
- Javascript allocations limited to 10MB
- 8 documents maximum loaded on the iPhone due to page view limitations
- Quicktime used for audio and video

- the page view feature lets you look at multiple websites and documents by scrolling thru them one after another
- Full PDF support
- double tap for zoom in
- one finger as a mouse used to
-- pan page
-- press and hold to display the information bubble
- two fingers as a mouse used to
-- pinch content to shrink - zoom out
-- pan page
-- scroll wheel events
- new telephone links allows you to integrate phone calls directly from your webpage. remember this is only on safari.
- built in google maps client for integrated mapping from your website

- separate html and css
- use well structured and valid html
- size images appropriately dont rely on browser scaling
- tile small images in backgrounds, dont use large backgroung images
- iPhone supports both EDGE and WiFi. EDGE pipe is smaller than WIFI pipe so think about bandwidth when developing.
- XHTML mobile documents supported
- stylesheet device width:480px
- apply different css for the iPhone. For example displaying a one column page for iphone vs a 3 column page on a desktop.
- there are no scroll bars or resize knobs. the iphone will automatically expand the content
- Avoid framesets, scrollable frames are automatically expanded to fit the content
- iPhone User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419.3
- Video: H.264 baseline profile level 3.0 up to 640480 fps

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61 months ago
interesting. It sure sheds light on a few things.
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61 months ago

...iPhone size limitations / restrictions are noted...


why would any of this be limited?
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61 months ago
rockin' -- let's see this thing go!
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61 months ago
Haha, 10mb max per page? Who's going to wait all day for 10mb to load over EDGE? Bit overkill if you ask me, but certainly not unwelcome.
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61 months ago
5 second limit to JavaScript: sooo say you're doing something in which AJAX sends data to the server and receives a response. Does this mean that if the round-trip takes more than five seconds, the application will hang?
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61 months ago
Scroll wheel events?
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61 months ago
i wonder how many apps, webpages and such can be run concurrently :confused:
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61 months ago
It's a hand held device. I am excited, despite the limitations.
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61 months ago

Univeristy of Washington's Emerging Technology group published notes from Apple's Developing Web Sites for iPhone session from WWDC last week.


Apple should post an official set of guidelines.

I am sure a lot of people want to make sections of their sites optimized for the iPhone, and with so many sites driven by databases (i.e., MySQL), scripting languages (i.e., PHP), and separating style from content (CSS), maintaing an iPhone-optimized site shouldn't be too hard for many.
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61 months ago

5 second limit to JavaScript: sooo say you're doing something in which AJAX sends data to the server and receives a response. Does this mean that if the round-trip takes more than five seconds, the application will hang?


Most likely an Ajax request will use an asynchronous request, meaning that Javascript will not actually be running while waiting for content to download from the server. Instead, when the data is retrieved Safari would call a Javascript function. Even if it was a synchronous request, Safari might consider the "halted" javascript to not actually be running, meaning the 5 second limit would not apply.
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