iPhone Web pages ("apps") should be 480 pixels wide, 10 MB maximum

Tony Chang from the University of Washington's Emerging Technology department has posted notes from the Developing Web Sites for iPhone session at WWDC where Apple told developers they could "learn iPhone best practices for ensuring optimal web development of your existing website, or hosted web application."

A few salient points:

• 480 pixel page width Apple recommends that developers use a 480 pixel-width stylesheet for iPhone-deliverable Web pages/apps. The reason, apparently: the iPhone's screen is 320x480 in portrait mode, 480x320 in landscape mode. Pages should scale down to 320 pixel-width when in portrait mode, rather than beind styled with 320 pixel-width initially then having to be stretched to 480 pixel-width for landscape mode.
• 10MB max for HTML, Javascript There is a 10MB maximum for HTML pages, and a 10MB maximum for Javascript allocation. In addition, there is a 5 second maximum runtime limit for Javascript. These are both apparent attempts at ensuring stability for the Safari browser on the iPhone.
• Pageview Apple discussed a feature called "Pageview" during the session that allows multiple Web pages to be viewed simultaneously in the absence of true windows as are used by the desktop version of Mac OS X. There is a maximum of 8 documents (or Web pages) that can be viewed simultaneously using this feature.
• Controls On the iPhone, one finger movement pans across the page. Pressing and holding the screen displays an information bubble about the page/app. Scroll wheel events are accessed via two-finder movement.
• QuickTime Links directly QuickTime-playable content automatically invoke full screen video playback. Apple recommends that Web developers provide low-bitrate versions of QuickTime media, and use the "iPhone" setting for QuickTime export.

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