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Is the iPad the new IE6

iPad is the new IE6

Imagine you are working on a project targeted for the iPad, Chrome and Safari that should contain an interactive HTML5 video… Design and feature-wise the project seems pretty simple and since you assume that the newest Webkit browsers have a good support for CSS3/HTML5/JavaScript (and Steve Jobs says it’s “amazing”) you shouldn’t have any issues building it, especially since you have coded many video players and interactive videos using Flash before and you are pretty experienced with HTML/JS projects and have used HTML5 video and CSS transitions/animations on a couple other projects.. A couple weeks of development should be fine… – Now you have a big problem.

This is something I’ve dealt with lately, sites not showing up correctly in the iPad. The iPad is a the first wave of simple specialized computers (OK, maybe the second after the iPhone and other smartphones), but it is one of the worst when it comes to displaying html pages consistently with IE, Firefox, Chrome and even the full version of Safari. Safari Mobile has quirks, especially with it’s complete lack of Flash support and difficulties with html5. iPad users complain when sites send them to their mobile pages, but that is the only way to guarantee a consistent experience on the Safari Mobile platform.

Many of us were hoping the days of coding for bad platforms like IE6 was over, but now the iPad rears it’s ugly head. This is an issue Apple should address as soon as possible.

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