The stupidity continues

Thanks a lot Apple. Now you've poisoned the boys and girls over the hill into thinking we should have a desktop interface metaphor on handhelds. Dudes, the emperor is not wearing any clothes!

If Sun CEO Jonathan Swartz is right, and I think he might be, then in the future:

...the majority of the world will use the internet through their phones, not through a PC."

Jonathan is not saying we won't use desktops. Far from it. But he feels the need to access information on a portable device will become a key driver of how people will want to use the internet.

With this in mind, I think it is fundamentally wrong to use a desktop interface metaphor on a portable device. The zoom and keyhole-browse features of the iPhone and Deepfish, and even Opera are very clever. But the definition of a browser is no longer based on the desktop. It could be on any device.

If I can't read the information on a web page that has been rendered like a tiny version of a PC desktop on my mobile device, or distinguish one item from another, then how the heck will I know what to zoom in on?! And looking at web pages through a keyhole? Who thought this would be a good experience for the user?

No, no, no. You should be serving me your information in a way that adapts to my device. This is called the web standards way. Did we learn nothing from letting Netscape create it's own non-standard HTML tags?

Furthermore, as a colleague of mine pointed out, people using browsers like this will have to pay for unnecessary bandwidth, because the full, desktop amount of content in a web site will be being served to the portable device, rather then being re-formatted for a handheld environment.

I still think this is a phenomenally stupid idea.