We have been asked several times recently about website compatibility on iPhones and iPads. People have heard that this is the next big thing, and are anxious that their websites will work on these platforms.
We’ve talked before on this blog about iPhone and iPad penetration in South Africa, and how that should have a bearing on your decision on whether or not to be concerned about your site’s compatibility.
For most websites in South Africa, the iPhone and iPad together make up less than 1% of all users of sites, so spending too much time (and money) on them shouldn’t be a priority.
Screen resolution and scaling
The iPad has a screen resolution of 1024×768, which is exactly the size of screen we optimise our websites for, so there is no problem there (assuming the iPad is in a landscape orientation). The iPhone has a smaller resolution, but has excellent built-in scaling and zooming systems, so viewing websites on it is generally no problem at all. So, from a general website point of view, your website should work fine on the iPad and iPhone without any modification.
There are two exceptions to this. Apple have decided for various reasons not to include Flash on their iPhones and iPads, and have inexplicably disabled file uploads from these devices.
Flash compatibility
The lack of Flash is generally not a problem. If iPhones are important, we simply avoid using Flash for slideshows, and use JavaScript coded animation instead. We’re getting quite good at that, and actually prefer it anyway, because it allows us to easily integrate the slideshows with the CMS, to give you complete control over the slides, captions, etc.
The biggest issue with the lack of Flash is embedded video. The standard way to embed video directly onto your site is to use a Flash player, and encode the video into the proprietary FLV format for use with the player. This will obviously not work on you iPhone or iPad. There is an alternative, but it uses a completely different encoding for your video, and currently doesn’t work on Internet Explorer, which will still cut out more than 60% of your market, on average. Our recommendation is to just use YouTube, Vimeo or one of the other major video providers – they have already solved this problem, and will deliver their video to any platform in a format optimised for that platform.
File Upload Issues
The file upload issue is more problematic. It will only really affect you if you want to use the iPhone or iPad to manage your site, but it does mean you cannot upload new images or documents when adding new content. I am baffled by Apple’s decision to disable file uploads. I assume that they’ve done so for some important security reason, but I can’t imagine what that might be. Every other browser can manage it, including their own Safari. This puts Apple’s claims of browser compatibility into a new light – they’re happy to ignore the standards if they become inconvenient.
Anyway, so far there haven’t been too many cases where this has been a problem, but we are working on a solution, possibly involving email, that will allow you to upload photos to your site, and use them on your iPhone or iPad. We hope to have something real soon.
So, in general, please don’t worry about iPhone and iPad compatibility. It isn’t really worth your while to spend much time or money trying to cater for such a small part of the market – your site should work fine without any additional effort.
