The University of Washington’s Emerging Technology group has published a collection of notes from the Developing Web Sites for iPhone session from WWDC last week.

Apple says that the iPhone offers the following for websites:

  • Most desktop class websites will work on the iPhone
  • Browsing the web is easy
  • Pan around page using one or two fingers
  • Two finger pinch used to zoom in and out
  • Page view feature allows multiple websites and documents to be viewed by scrolling through them one after another
  • New telephone links allows you to integrate phone calls directly from your webpage
  • Full PDF support

Also listed are Safari’s capabilities and limitations on the iPhone:

  • Support for all the latest web standards
  • WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group)
  • HTML5
  • 10MB max HTML size for web page
  • Javascript limited to 5 seconds run time
  • Javascript allocations limited to 10MB
  • 8 documents maximum loaded on the iPhone due to page view limitations
  • Quicktime used for audio and video

It has been officially confirmed that the iPhone will not have Flash or Java.

Apple spoke about good design practices for websites designed to be viewed on the iPhone:

  • Separate html and css
  • Use well structured and valid html
  • Size images appropriately don’t rely on browser scaling
  • Tile small images in backgrounds
  • Don’t use large background images
  • Avoid complicated framesets, better yet don’t use framesets at all
  • iPhone supports both EDGE and WiFi. EDGE pipe is smaller then WIFI pipe so think about bandwidth when developing
  • XHTML mobile documents supported
  • Stylesheet device width:480px
  • Apply different css for the iPhone. For example displaying a one column page for iphone vs a 3 column page on a desktop
  • there are no scroll bars or resize knobs. the iphone will automatically expand the content
  • Scrollable frames are automatically expanded to fit the content
  • Frames exploded to the full scale and then fit to the screen