The BBC has been experimenting with some alternative layouts for some articles on mobile devices. Read on for the details, but especially for the philosophical musings towards the end—this is gold dust:
Even the subtext of Google’s marketing push around Progressive Web Apps is that mobile websites must aspire to be more like native apps. While I’m as excited about getting access to previously native-only features such as offline support and push notifications as the next web dev, I’m not sure that the mobile web should only try to imitate the kind of user interfaces that we see on native.
Do mobile websites really dream of being native apps, any more than they dreamt of being magazines?
The responsive BBC News site is live! Hurrah!
Here’s a look at the highs and lows of the site’s story, emphasising the importance of progressive enhancement and all that enables: feature detection (by “cutting the mustard”), conditional loading, and a mobile-first approach.
BBC News are using the mobile subdomain to plant the seed of responsive design. It’s a smart move that’s been really nicely executed.
An entire generation of apps-that-should-have-been web pages has sprung up, often shoehorned into supposedly cross-platform frameworks that create a subpar user experience sludge. Nowhere is this more true than for media — how many apps from newspapers or magazines have you installed, solely for a very specific purpose like receiving breaking news alerts? How many of those apps are just wrappers around web views? How many of those apps should have been web pages?
But you can’t have a web app without a web-app-compatible browser, and you can’t get a web-app-compatible browser in Apple’s App Store. The only browsers permitted in the App Store are those based on WebKit, the browser engine behind Safari. This means that every browser on iOS, from Firefox to Edge to Chrome, is just a reskinned version of Safari.
Adrian brings an excellent historical perspective to the horrifying behaviour of Facebook’s in-app browsers:
Somewhere along the way, despite a reasonably strong anti-framing culture, framing moved from being a huge no-no to a huge shrug. In a web context, it’s maligned; in a native app context, it’s totally ignored.
Yup, frames are back—but this time they’re in native apps—with all their shocking security implications:
The more I think about it, the more I cannot believe webviews with unfettered JavaScript access to third-party websites ever became a legitimate, accepted technology. It’s bad for users, and it’s bad for websites.
By the way, this also explains that when you try browsing the web in an actual web browser on your mobile device, every second website shoves a banner in your face saying “download our app.” Browsers offer users some protection. In-app webviews offer users nothing but exploitation.
A problem shared is a problem halved. And the web has a big problem with awful overlays.
It’s kind of ridiculous that this functionality doesn’t exist yet.
Between the physical and the digital. Between native apps and the World Wide Web.
The number one feature request I have for mobile Safari is web notifications (even if I won’t personally use them).
Filing an issue for the lazy web. Somebody build this!