Oh my God, oh my God. Apple thinks it has a bright idea, but craps all over your beautiful responsive sites. Even worse, it’s being inconsistent from iPhone to iPad. I don’t know what they were smoking when they thought this up, but I want some.

OK, so what’s going on? This morning a follower pointed out an article that describes how Safari iOS makes a total fucking mess of the meta viewport when the site is hosted on a .mobi domain.

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When I spoke at From the Front I was asked what I thought was the worst case of thoughtless copy/pasting I saw going on around the web. My answer: jQuery.

I feel that jQuery, even the mobile version, and in fact all current JavaScript libraries, are too heavy for mobile. I think it’s time for a re-evaluation of the libraries’ good and bad parts. I followed up in this tweet, which caused quite a few reactions.

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Yesterday Mark Zuckerberg said (paraphrased):

The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5. While building native apps that were basically just a wrapper for the mobile web standard let it experiment quickly, it made the apps run way too slow. We burnt two years.

Two quick notes:

1. This seems to be not about HTML5 as a whole, but specifically about Android. And the Android 2.x default browser is just not very good. I wouldn’t want to create a cutting-edge HTML5 app on Android 2.
2. You can’t use the web to emulate native. You should use the web in a webby way. Which I guess means a simpler interface with less flourishes.

So all in all, this remark doesn’t say as much as you’d think; only that Facebook will switch from web to native on Android because the Android browser does not allow web to emulate native.

But will they also create BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Symbian, bada, and S40 apps? I think not.

BTW: here is the full quote. Facebook to forget about HTML5? Nah.

Oh, and one reason Zuckerberg said this is because investors want to hear this. Investors are a bunch of clueless people who only run after buzzwords, and Facebook’s delicate position on the stock market makes it necessary to placate them.

In preparation for tomorrow’s iPhone announcements I’d like to repeat something I said last October: the iPhone 3GS will be produced for many years to come, and its price will drop a little every year.

Update: Well, it seems I was wrong here. The 3GS has been nixed. Pity.

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