Website design catering for touchscreens

[PAH]

They all offer apps optimised for the touch screen experience, as do ebay & imdb and lots of others. I doubt many people visit the sites directly from their smartphone or ipad browser.

I hate the idea of having to redevelop a website as an app for it to be desirable on a particular device.

I'm hoping HTML5 will be successful enough that one site designed correctly will work on all but the tiniest mobile screen.

Unless the app needs to harness device specific tech, that is not available via a browser, there can't be many genuine reasons why an app is better than a website for a website fronted company.

Maybe my views are distorted by witnessing people spending ages working on WAP sites only for them to be obsolete by the time they went live.

[d000hg]

Amazon are one example of a site which has replaced their Kindle App with an HTML5 web app on iOS - in so doing they avoid the restrictions of the iStore and the 30% cut Apple demand. I think we'll see that being the trend as mobile HTML5 continues to mature.

[VectraMan]

For a startk, XP will never progress beyond IE8 and XP is still massive in the business world. So suggesting only those stuck in the past have not bothered to upgrade to IE9 isn't really useful - if your site targets businesses then IE8 has to be a prime consideration, not a fallback.

All of this is a good argument for Flash. It's the one solution that works the same for everybody. Well, nearly everybody.

Perhaps the better answer is an HTML5 version and a Flash version.

[PAH]

Apple have killed off Flash.

HTML5 FTW!

[VectraMan]

Apple have killed off Flash.

Still works for me.

All very well killing off Flash, but SVG is essentially the same thing, just now under the HTML5 guise. You can say that it's better as an open standard, blah-blah blah, but end users won't care and those annoying ads will look exactly the same rendered by SVG as they did by Flash.

So flashy animated things in SVG for modern browsers, do a Flash version for old browsers, and basic as possible HTML everywhere else. That way you can support IE1.

[d000hg]

Apple have killed off Flash.

A minority platform can't kill off anything. And Flash does WAAAY more than HTML5 attempts to cover. HTML5 can kill off Flash video and banner ads, that would be fine... although it might make blocking said ads harder if they're innocuous bits of HTML.

[PAH]

although it might make blocking said ads harder if they're innocuous bits of HTML.

Bingo! The real reason the industry is moving from Flash to HTML5.

They really want you to see those adverts.