Scripting News: Today's iPhone isn't a reading device

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Today's iPhone isn't a reading device

Here's how the browser on my desktop works.

I click on a link and immediately start reading the text on the screen.

When I click on a link in Safari on the iPhone, before I can read anything, I have to futz with the display resolution of the browser to make the text visible. This may not sound like a problem, but what a distraction, when following a link, before getting the idea, your mind has to take a detour into managing the device. In reading as in the movies, suspension of disbelief is broken when your mind has to exit the space of ideas and manage the projection device. It's wrong for the device to ask you this, even as a setup issue it should be usable out of the box, but it's unacceptable that it make the user configure the browser every time it displays a new page.

Today's iPhone isn't a reading device. It wouldn't take much to configure the browser to be an excellent reading device, but Apple will have to give up the idea that the browser should work the same as the desktop browsers do. The iPhone is nowhere near as capable as a desktop display. Wishing it were so, and shifting the burden to the user to make it so, is not an acceptable solution.

I thought I could overcome this by creating a special version of a site just for the iPhone that crammed all the text into a narrow column, thinking that the browser wouldn't see any need to make the text small because it would have all the necessary horizontal screen real estate to display every character at a fully visible resolution.

Nope. It still displays the text in an unreadably small font.

Here's a photo of the iPhone displaying a test page.

It's behaving like no web browser I've ever seen, and it's behaving badly. It's breaking an implicit agreement between all platforms that co-exist on the web. We create sites that assume nothing about the device they're being rendered on, and browsers should take care to make our text readable for users of their device. The iPhone web browser doesn't keep that promise.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:01:03 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Jun Aug