The Ubiquitous, Mobile Web: The Final Frontier

The web works better when web sites are tailored to the capabilities of the platform.

That's a given, as far as I am concerned. 

I have avoiding dealing with this issue in the past in terms of mobile devices in the hopes that the browsers mobile phones will eventually mature to point of approaching desktop capabilities.  Also, I am sure that there is some amount of push back to browser quirkiness following the Netscape/IE browser quirk wars of the past decades.

But now, as I await delivery of an iPhone 3G, I wonder if I might be doing more to push development for the mobile platform in general.

For example, I have used the Opera 9.5 browser (a leaked beta :) on my HTC TyTN for the past few months and I am amazed by how fluidly and quickly it renders and zooms fairly complex web pages - even on a QVGA (320x240) screen.  I am hoping/assuming that mobile Safari, which Opera is ostensibly attempting to surpass with it's mobile browser efforts, will be even more useful and amazing.

It does beg the question, though, about where the responsibility for the overall mobile browsing experience lies: the browser implementation, or the web developers themselves.  As an architect, it makes perfect sense that we should design and build web controls that will degrade their functionality based on the mobile browser's known capabilities.  This rarely happens.

Most web sites, in my experience, are envisioned by people who haven't had exposure to the Internet on the kinds of mobile browsers, like Safari and Opera, that actually make mobile browser worthwhile.  That being said, it should also be noted that most web site are also envisioned as a set of features that must answer to features on competing web sites.  Far from being able to think about what the user experience ought to be on a handheld platform, we often can't even escape the vertical market that we operate within.

So what is the answer? 

Should a mobile web site come "out of the box" when a developer drops a custom web control on a page? 

Should we be pushing for a second stream of mobile development to complement the "standard" mobile development?

Or should we just let the mobile device handle the page that was designed for the desktop?

Should Flash and Silverlight be expected to run in these environments?

At this point, do we even know what a "mobile device" mean?  Does it include UMPCs, MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices), or the smaller laptops like the Asus EEE PC (and all of its copy cats)?

So many questions, and no answers.