TUAW has a rant about web sites made specifically for iPhones and how it’s wrong!
Nothing irks me more than browsing to a site only to be greeted with a page that, based on the user agent my browser supplies, keeps me out. Try going to some of these new iPhone webapps in Safari 3 on a Mac or PC and that’s just what you’ll encounter. Why? These apps will run just fine on my desktop, and yet I am left out of the fun.
It’s a fair point. Just to choose a very very nice-looking example, FlickIM, which provides AIM/iChat services in a slick AJAX interface. It uses browser detection to lock those of us not on iPhones out. That kinda sucks.
This is precisely what subdomains were invented for. And directories.
I don’t want to be snippy here but I’d rather be directed to http://iphone.somedomain.com or http://www.somedomain.com/iphone if I’m going to see iPhone-optimised content. Don’t direct me – the version of Safari in the iPhone is meant to be the real Web after all.