Among many interesting details of Apple’s forthcoming iPhone is its apparent strong support for web standards. The Safari browser it ships with, now also available on Windows, is considered by many to be the most standards-compliant of all major web browsers.

Roughly Drafted considers the impact of the iPhone and the importance of open standards to its development, as well as the importance its success could have on further pushing open standards for the web and for mobile devices themselves.

“The iPhone offers the Safari web browser as a third party development platform. That means IT groups won’t have to write iPhone specific ports of their custom apps… It also means that any development invested in building custom applications targeted for the iPhone will automatically be cross-platform, and work on any other mobile devices that support a standards-based web browser.”

The first part of the article covers various reactions to the iPhone, and wonders whether negative pieces may be inspired by vendors who fear the impact this embrace of open standards will have on their proprietary mobile devices. The end of the article reviews how strong support for open standards has helped propel Apple’s latest product, functionality-wise, beyond its competitors even before it has been launched.

As an Apple and open source/open standards fan, the launch of the iPhone is going to be very interesting.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 2:11 pm and is filed under Free Culture, Mac, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.