Developing for Small Screens and the Mobile Web

Abstract

As we’ve discussed earlier, the evolution of the World Wide Web has been extremely chaotic when compared to other technologies. This Darwinian model has arguably had both positive and negative effects. Developing for the desktop web browsing experience was tumultuous at best for a long time, with user agent capabilities varying wildly. However, if you thought that was wild, then you’d better buckle your seat belt because we’re about to take you on the rollercoaster ride that is mobile web development, which has been described by experts as “the most hostile programming environment ever devised.”¹

This is a famous statement by Douglas Crockford, a world-renowned JavaScript expert and senior front-end web development specialist at Yahoo!. He used to be well known for stating that the desktop web browser was the most hostile programming environment on the planet—that is, until the mobile browser was conceived.