Apple has published guidelines for developing web content for the iPhone. Some of the guidelines are just good practice (separating HTML, Javascript and CSS, for instance). Some of it is informational (how many pixels you can expect to be available in the iPhone - at least, in this version of it). Some of it is very iPhone-specific (META tags to help control the viewport and scaling).

The article also includes guidelines for encoding audio and video for access over EDGE and Wifi networks.

The iPhone runs a slimmed down version of Apple’s desktop browser “Safari” - you get real HTML, Javascript and CSS support, and it can do Ajax. In my few days with an iPhone I haven’t found any web sites that simply didn’t work on it, including Javascript-heavy sites like Flickr.

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Of course almost everybody loves Ajax, but as web page tech evolves it brings with it a whole host of new problems as pages bloat out, carrying with them their own assortments of secondary files: CSS and Javascript libraries that they depend on. Imagine an subroutine call which, every time you called it, required libraries many times its size to be loaded and linked in - this is what’s going on when you load modern web pages.

prototype.js is likely the most popular Ajax implementation out there, and getting it skinny will certainly help load times for web pages depending on it. Ajaxian points to a collection of compressed prototype.js files.

Via: Ajaxian » Compressed versions of Prototype
[tags]prototype, prototype.js, compressed, ajax[/tags]

Ajaxian offered up a pointer to a Macintosh Dashboard widget for searching the documentation for the prototype.js documentation.

prototype.js is an excellent Javascript library which provides browser-independent AJAX functionality. It’s at the heart of many AJAX-based applications out there.

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