November 2009
Intermediate to advanced
407 pages
8h 16m
English
Content preview from Safari® and WebKit Development for iPhone® OS 3.0Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 14. Packaging Apps as Bookmarks: Bookmarklets and Data URLs
Because iPhone Web applications function inside the Safari environment, as a Web developer, you have two seemingly obvious restrictions: you must live with the built-in capabilities of the Safari/WebKit browser; and you need a constant Wi-Fi (or, for iPhone, 3G) connection to run any application.
As you already found out in Chapter 13, "Bandwidth and Performance Optimizations," you can use HTML5 offline storage capabilities to get around the dependency on a live connection. However, two lesser-known technologies — bookmarklets and data URLs — can provide similar results. These technologies have actually been around for years, but they have tended to exist on the periphery of mainstream Web development. However, developers are now reexamining these two developer tools to maximize the potential of the iPhone Web application platform.
Bookmarklets (short for bookmark applets) are mini JavaScript "applets" that can be stored as bookmarks inside Safari. A data URL is a technique for storing an entire Web page or application (pages, styles, images, data, and scripts) inside a single URL, which can then be saved as an iPhone bookmark inside Safari. This application-in-a-bookmark can then be accessed in offline mode.
Bookmarklets
A bookmarklet is JavaScript stored as a URL and saved as a bookmark in the browser. It is typically used as a one-click applet that performs a specific task or performs an action on the current Web ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.