> The only time he ever said anything else was when every web site in the world ran on flash and iphone couldn't do flash.
This is wildly inaccurate. Flash was never anywhere near that popular and it wasn’t an industry standard. The industry standards were HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and sites that used those were way more common than sites that ran on Flash. We’re not talking a lot more common, we’re talking at least 30–40x as common. Flash-only sites were an annoying but small minority.
The iPhone was the first phone with excellent support for the HTML/CSS/JavaScript industry standards. It literally changed the web development industry it was that good. In 2007, mobile sites tended to sit on m.example.com separate from the main site, and use WAP/WML. The “really good” ones had a severely cut back plain HTML version. None used Flash, that wasn’t even a factor on mobile at all.
Then along comes the iPhone with Mobile Safari. Practically overnight, people were asking for “iPhone-compatible” websites to be built, which were really just normal websites with CSS media queries to offer a mobile-friendly layout. That’s what Steve Jobs was talking about when he was describing a “desktop-class web browser” in his keynote speech.
And because WebKit was open-source, all the other smartphones started using it and got the same capabilities. In the space of a year or two, the mobile web transformed from something virtually nobody wanted to something useful and fun – all using industry standard HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
Ignoring the fact that Flash was terrible quality, which other people have responded to, that whole era of the iPhone is practically defined by Steve Jobs betting hard on industry standards instead of Flash and other proprietary stuff.
> The only time he ever said anything else was when every web site in the world ran on flash and iphone couldn't do flash.
This is wildly inaccurate. Flash was never anywhere near that popular and it wasn’t an industry standard. The industry standards were HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and sites that used those were way more common than sites that ran on Flash. We’re not talking a lot more common, we’re talking at least 30–40x as common. Flash-only sites were an annoying but small minority.
The iPhone was the first phone with excellent support for the HTML/CSS/JavaScript industry standards. It literally changed the web development industry it was that good. In 2007, mobile sites tended to sit on m.example.com separate from the main site, and use WAP/WML. The “really good” ones had a severely cut back plain HTML version. None used Flash, that wasn’t even a factor on mobile at all.
Then along comes the iPhone with Mobile Safari. Practically overnight, people were asking for “iPhone-compatible” websites to be built, which were really just normal websites with CSS media queries to offer a mobile-friendly layout. That’s what Steve Jobs was talking about when he was describing a “desktop-class web browser” in his keynote speech.
And because WebKit was open-source, all the other smartphones started using it and got the same capabilities. In the space of a year or two, the mobile web transformed from something virtually nobody wanted to something useful and fun – all using industry standard HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
Ignoring the fact that Flash was terrible quality, which other people have responded to, that whole era of the iPhone is practically defined by Steve Jobs betting hard on industry standards instead of Flash and other proprietary stuff.