More iPhone web development info

The University of Washington’s Emerging Technology group has posted a list of interesting tips given by Apple at the WWDC about developing web applications for the iPhone. (Update that link has already been removed. I’ve reposted it here ).

The limitations here are good to know:

• 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

All of them make a lot of sense and well designed web applications shouldn’t be affected. I’m wondering though what happens if a Javascript takes more than 5 seconds. Also I assume that they don’t count the time waiting for a server request in an Ajax call.

It also mentions that they recommend applying different css for the iPhone. As we do to day for existing mobile and print versions. I do hope though that they have their own media type and aren’t relying on ‘handheld’ because that could mean creating css for the lowest common denominator and not using modern css.

I started a thread on the iPhoneWebDev google group about my assumptions and wishes for iPhone html and css support.

One thing I would really like to see are :portrait,:landscape css pseudo classes. That would make it really easy to disable or enable page features to make our apps even more iPhone like.

Tedd Tschopp replied:

If they return a browser resize event when you go from landscape to
portrait you can then write a small JavaScript event to watch for that
event and swap out a base class on the body tag. That seems very
doable.

That is a definitely good way of doing it if they don’t specifically provide css pseudo class support. It would be almost as easy to do as in pure css with a LowPro behaviour.