I recently spent time making Parchment work properly on my new iPhone 3G.
The iPhone has been my first foray into the world of the mobile web, and getting Parchment to work well on it was an interesting experience. Some of the challenges I faced involved getting the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard to display properly—Parchment doesn’t actually have any text input fields on it, so by default the iPhone didn’t think that users had to enter text—and modifying some processor-intensive JavaScript code so that the iPhone didn’t think that Parchment had gone into an infinite loop.
Another interesting challenge was figuring out how best to display content so that it would be viewable in a way that didn’t require the end-user to perform unnecessary panning and zooming. By default, the iPhone assumes that pages it views were made to look good on a page that’s about 980 pixels wide, so that’s how big the “virtual viewport” is; this default seems to make sense, since most pages were made with desktop screens in mind, and the ability to zoom and pan makes it relatively usable. However, when a developer is creating a rendering of a site specifically for smaller screens, they can force a particular viewport size—thus minimizing or entirely obviating the need to pan and zoom—by inserting a viewport meta tag in the HTML and using some iPhone-specific CSS properties like -webkit-text-size-adjust. All of these sorts of issues were documented nicely in Apple’s Safari Web Content Guide for iPhone. Though they’re not “standards” per se (at least as far as I know), nonetheless I think that tailoring pages for an incredibly small, zoomable screen could be viewed as little different from tailoring them for print—something CSS already supports—so I hope that these extensions can eventually be turned into standards and supported by other mobile browsers like Fennec.
Right now my biggest criticism of the iPhone, despite all its enormous benefits, is the fact that its native platform is quite sterile, or at best contingently generative. I was hoping that the open web would be one way to get around this, and getting Parchment to work on the device was my way of testing these waters.
Parchment’s ultimate goal, as outlined on its Google Code project page, is to serve as a compelling replacement for desktop-based Z-machine interpreters. Among other things, this implies that it should work fine when disconnected from the internet, and it does: once you’ve started a game, it’s entirely loaded into the browser and no further network connections are made. In Firefox 2 or above, selecting “Work Offline” from the “File” menu will allow you to still access the game and play it even if you don’t currently have it loaded in a tab (why Firefox can’t automatically detect whether you’re offline is being worked on). You can even save and load games while offline because the game state is appended to the URL hash—put in DOM Storage too, if support is detected—and Damien Neil has a patch that uses PersistJS to provide even better support.
The thing is, Safari on the iPhone doesn’t seem to have any kind of “offline mode” like Firefox does. Further, it only keeps one web page loaded at a time, even though it has something resembling tabbed browsing; so if you switch from Parchment to another website and back to Parchment, the entire page is reloaded—something that not only consumes network bandwidth but also processor time. This hugely limits Parchment from becoming a compelling replacement for a native iPhone app that does the same thing. And thanks to Apple’s gate-keeping, there’s serious doubt as to whether the latter is even a possibility.
I also have no idea if Apple is even likely to introduce an offline mode for the iPhone, because there appears to be a clear conflict of interest between their closed platform and the open web: it makes sense for Apple to “gimp” the web as much as it can so that application developers are forced to develop for the platform that Apple controls. So I’m really looking forward to both Fennec and Android supporting generativity in the mobile space.
In any case, if you have an iPhone, feel free to play a story on Parchment and let me know what you think.