I was involved with Palm in the very early days of mobile web surfing. The debate back then was how to serve websites.
There were two main options. If you give mobile surfers the whole site (Option 1), it will be slow, and it will be poorly formatted to the small screen. If you reformat the websites to make them fast to load and easy to read (Option 2), you lose the authenticity of surfing the real world.
The iPhone took a clear stance in favor of the former alternative. They download and display the whole website quite accurately. They were able to pull this off (years after the Palm initiative) because of important technical advancements: higher res screens that allowed small text to be legible, a scalable graphics and text rendering layer that allows pages to be zoomed to any level of magnification, and 3G & WiFi networking that made loading the full, original web page directly, without a transcoding proxy, tolerable.
And this works. Sorta. Apple’s early iPhone ads featured someone pinch-zooming into an article blurb on the New York Times home page. Well, this just so happens to be a narrow newspaper-like column of text that actually lends itself to reading on the small display of a mobile phone.
Most prose on the web is not so narrow. In real life, reading a web page as originally formatted involves a lot of laborious pinching and scrolling, both horizontal and vertical. It’s so laborious that I have found it simply too much work to read articles this way on my iPhone.
Instead, I channel all of my iPhone articles through an app that caches and reformats it for the small screen. (I happen to use Instapaper, which I have found edges out its close competitor, Read It Later.) It’s a great solution, and as a bonus, it even increases my productivity: rather than getting lost in the surf when I am at my computer supposedly working, I click the Read Later button and channel it off to my iPhone for reading during downtime.
But importantly, Instapaper reformats the web content so it’s very easy to read on the iPhone. The text is as large as you need it to be, it syncs quickly since it cuts out the graphics, and no evil horizontal scrolling is involved. Instapaper also has a brilliant tilt-to-scroll feature that makes scrolling feel like it’s not a task at all, just a subtle change in the angle at which you are holding the device. This experience is a night-and-day difference from attempting to read the original web page that was designed for a computer display crammed onto a screen that fits in the hand.
The only remaining trouble is that moving everything through Instapaper is extra steps, and I am still forced to skip some content because of it.
Which brings us to today’s idea to steal: To Apple, and anyone else who creates web browsers for mobile experiences: it’s great that you can render a web page accurately. Thanks, and congratulations. But for actual readability, please provide the option to quickly load and reformat a page for the small screen. Support both Option 1 and Option 2.
(Oh, and while you’re at it, you should pick up on what Instapaper has discovered and build in support for offline caching and reading, so it’s available to all applications.)
