Chapter 5

Enabling and Optimizing Web Sites for the iPhone and iPad

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

  • Making your website compatible with IOS devices
  • Making your site easy to navigate from iPhone and iPad
  • Adding custom style sheets for IOS devices

Although this book is focused on developing web apps for IOS devices, the reality is that you’ll probably also need to deal with designing a website that is compatible with iPhone and iPad.

I remember having trouble browsing the Web on the iPhone when it was first released in 2007. I recall one evening in which my boys and I were watching the third quarter of a Monday Night Football game. The electricity suddenly went out because of a town-wide outage. Because my son’s favorite team was playing, he was frantic. What’s happening in the game? Are the Titans still winning? I immediately pulled out my iPhone and confidently launched Safari in search of answers. But upon going to NFL.com, I discovered that its live updating scoreboard was Adobe Flash media. All I could see was a gray box with a Lego-like block in its place. I then pointed the browser to the official Tennessee Titans site, only to discover more useless empty blocks scattered across its front page as well. We spent the rest of the outage using the iPhone to scour the Web, looking for a sports site to help us.

Fast forward to today. The expectations of the iPhone and iPad user are far different than what I had in 2007. At that time, I would just accept the lack of mobile ...

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