I'm not going to completely defend this practice, but I will say that in my experience, the distinction has to do with screen resolution more than anything else. That is, many web developers designed their sites specifically for 800x600 screens for years, when that was the default resolution for most monitors (peaking at 56% in 2000). Then, as higher-res monitors started to take over, some developers abandoned the 800x600 "standard" and started coding for 1024x768 (which similarly reached a peak of around 57% in 2006, but has since started to drop):

http://www.brainwrap.com/faq/screen_resolution.html

Of course, many developers make their sites "stretchy", widening & narrowing to match the width of just about any browser window/screen resolution, but there are limits, and the 480/320 range of handhelds does generally call for a different layout.

Ironically, as you noted, the whole point of the iPhone's browser is that you don't have to worry about screen resolution, since you can pan & scan all over the place quickly, but it sounds like an awful lot of developers *want* to make iPhone sites that don't *require* horizontal scrolling (which is, after all, "taboo" on the general web--I guess old habits die hard is all...

My point is that coding for a particular screen resolution strikes me as being somewhat different than coding for a specific browser-type, which is what you usually think of when it comes to the old "best viewed with..." coding.

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Not to seem cynical but Yes.

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I hate the idea of "iPhone-ified" sites. I bought the iPhone because my Blackberry didn't show me the real internet and now I am catching myself using just the iPhone version of the site. Half of my reasoning is that edge is so slow, the iPhone sites make it just bearable.

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Dude, one word: EDGE. In Chicago, I get about 12-80 kilobits per second speed with full bars of reception...it's slow! If there were an option to turn off the downloading of images, I'd be a little less hesitant to go to the normal web when on EDGE network. Again, EDGE is a turtle, that's why. I even called AT&T to see why it's so slow, and I was punted back and forth between them and Apple...not good times.

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A lot of the sites popping up seem to be more like web apps than pure web pages. When that's the focus, I don't see any problem targeting the iPhone specifically. Ultimately, does it result in a better user experience? If it does and the iPhone becomes popular enough, perhaps we'll have a defacto standard for a higher quality mobile web application experience as other phone makers copy the features.

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I think the web 2.0 apps on the iphone is the best thing apple could've done - Why pay people to develop for your product when hundreds of thousands of developers will do it for free, and the apps will be better and more diverse :D

On that note, developers making aps for iphones please list your apps here.
http://www.innermindmedia.com/iphoneaps.php

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If you want to run iPhone Applications on your Mac you can run them inside an iPhone spoofer like iPhoney.

Or (shameless plug follows) you can convert them into desktop widgets using our new widget platform, Amnesty Hypercube:

http://www.amnestywidgets.com/HypercubeMac.html

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Don't forget that Apple has made this the only way to write applications for the iPhone. Since everyone want's their apps to look like iPhone apps, they're coding these specific pages.

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As both an iPhone user and an iPhone developer have to make a quick comment here. I personally test my App in IE, Firefox, Safari and of course Mobile Safari (the iPhone). Now I have 1 goal, make an App that works on an iPhone. BUT (and I stress BUT) I do not make design decisions that break the app on other platforms. I think that you may find other developers that feel the same way (then again maybe not, I mean iUI is platform specific).

The reason iPhone webapps are so specific to the iphone is because its the Apps Target market. for example my app, https://PassVault,ktomics.net, could easily have all of its forms & screens reformatted for a standard window. But I have tested that experience on an iPhone. Its functional but not pleasant. So because my target market is an iPhone user, I format my site to function in that smaller form factor. does that make it an iPhone webpage? maybe so. Taking this discussion a step further it is not uncommon for a web platform to render different content based on the browser anyways. ASP.NET renders different JavaScript based on the browser, heck even your browser can choose a specific CSS link based on attributes in the tag. What I am getting at is Browser specific formatting is not unique to the iPhone.; and its a far cry better than having to write an entirely separate presentation layer like you do with WML and WAP (mobile) sites!

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As a web designer, contending with the iPhone is just accounting for another browser. I still have to worry about IE 6 (God, help us!) even though it has been that special kid in the corner of the class eating paste since, uhm, forever. So, like #1 said above, it's just another part of designing. So, now when I design a site, I have to really consider, "Is there a way I can do this without Flash since iPhone doesn't support it?" and "Oh, yah, can't do a :hover based menu because it won't work with iPhone." I'd rather deal with those things than peek-a-boo bugs and wonky box model stuff.

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correction - https://passvault.ktomics.net (fat-fingered a comma into the URL.)

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Are websites starting to catch the iPhone user agent string and forcing users onto the 'iPhone version' of the site? Like how the Weblogs, Inc. sites do (at least when I hit them on my blackberry)?

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#10--"Oh, yah, can't do a :hover based menu because it won't work with iPhone."

Oy, is that correct? Are you just talking about Flash-based drop-down menus, or *any* of them (ie, Javascript-based, for example)? I knew about the lack of Flash support, but didn't realize that rollover menus wouldn't work either...

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Double-standards? Hell yes. Apple should be working towards and open and unified web consistently, not fragmenting it into little fiefdoms.

Apple has just ignored handheld stylesheet support specified by the W3C. Luckily they are using CSS3 media queries but then break it for other advanced mobile browsers by specifying it as screen only.

See this for more details:

http://my.opera.com/dstorey/blog/iphone-and-developing-for-mobile

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So far things like Digg's iPhone version, and other things that are merely iPhone only apps have been great. When they start forcing them on me, I'll start complaining. Right now, the iPhone specific pages are awesome, and IMHO better than the regular counterparts (Digg for iPhone is awesome).

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i just thought that the "made for iphone" sites were just designed to fit the iphone screen better, but i had forgotten about the lack of flash needed, etc. hmm, good points, all -- i'm being a hypocrite by supporting iphone optimized sites, and i didn't even know it!

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Charles G - yup, no hover. iPhone doesn't recognize mouseover.
See page 29 of the PDF here: http://barcamp.org/iPhoneDevCamp

And now for the main topic. First of all, no one is designing iPhone-only sites. (Except for a few people who are using it as a development platform to deliver iPhone apps because that's the only choice. But we didn't get mad when people started writing Widgets for Tiger, did we?) They are (mostly) iPhone-OPTIMIZED versions of EXISTING sites. Because of this, there is no double-standard with regard to our hate of IE-only sites. There's a BIG difference between (voluntarily) making ANOTHER version of a site that is OPTIMIZED for one platform or another versus writing a site that only FUNCTIONS with one non-standards-compliant browser.

Also, people aren't just optimizing the look, they're optimizing the load time due to EDGE slowness.

As for "But Steve said it's the REAL Internet!!!!11", there are several points here as well: 1) Yeah, but do you want to HAVE to zoom in and out and pan all around? Wouldn't it be nice to have sites that fit nicely onto such a tiny screen? 2) This is actually a Good Thing, because more and more people ARE using mobile devices to browse, but browsing with a tiny screen sucks. I think this will lead people to make not just iPhone-friendly sites, but more and more MOBILE-friendly sites. (Even if that just means simpler layouts, @mobile style sheets, etc.) I've got a Dell Axim with a 640x480 screen--twice that of the iPhone!--and mobile browsing still mostly sucks. What are the only sites that are good to visit on suck a device? A) Old-school, 1996-looking sites that just present lots and lots of content without ANY tables OR CSS columns of any kind, and B) sites designed to work on tiny screens, like the mobile versions of Yahoo Mail, Google Mail, etc. Also, TUAW looks great, though you can only read headlines and stories (not comments) in the mobile-optimized view.

Shrinking the whole Web to a blurry, unreadable size to fit onto a 3.5" screen and letting people zoom in is NOT the answer. It's a nice workaround but it is far from ideal. Also people browse differently on mobile devices. Do you need to see every single DIGG story when you're out and about? Are you going to spend hours on your phone, with dozens of windows and tabs open? No, you probably just want to kill a few minutes in line at the bank, so a few of the top stories will do.

The fact is, the Web will be seen on more and more tiny devices, and the Web would be GREAT if it didn't assume everyone had infinite screen real estate and bandwidth. For another example of an alternate delivery device, look at the Nintendo Wii--when hooked to an SD TV, you're working with roughly the equivalent of 640x480. Ideally, people would write to standards and not get worked up into a fervor over the design and would instead deliver sites that look great at 320 wide or 1680 wide or anything in between. Until that happens, I'll be grateful for every web developer who decides to offer a mobile-optimized version of their site.

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Although I somewhat agree with what you are saying here, I do have to wonnder, it's 2007, why in the world would you still be in the "AOL" family, and why would you still be on dial up????

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The answer is relatively simple: since the web browser is the "SDK" on the iPhone these sites are iPhone only because they are meant to be iPhone apps and not general web apps.

You could argue that if something is a good iPhone app it might make a good web app as well, but that assumes that the developer is willing to take the time to make it both a web app and an iPhone app.

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Your post attacks too many things at once, but makes one good point. For me, the issue isn't mobile sites existing... it's autodetection and force-feeding of these sites for iPhone.

- I think we'd all agree that iPhone *apps* can be optimized and autodetected for iPhone-only viewing, without question. That's the point. The fact that these are actually websites doesn't matter... were there an SDK, these likely wouldn't even exist.

- iPhone and/or mobile-optimized sites are similarly allowable, as they're fantastic to use on low-bandwidth connections, regardless of browser capabilities. Try comparing http://www.ilounge.com to http://www.ilounge.com/mobile from an EDGE connection. The mobile version is a fantastic way to browse from a slower connection.

- The problem lies in sites (and these are hypothetical for me, as I haven't encountered any personally) that detect that you're on an iPhone, and automatically redirect you to the mobile site. For Blackberries (comment 12), Treos, and other poor-browser mobile phones, that makes more sense. For the iPhone, though, this shouldn't happen... at all. Sure, it'd be cool if a developer could detect whether you're on EDGE or not, but even then, we should have the choice of which version of the site to load simply because the iPhone *can* do well with either.

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