why mobile websites?

matt thommes:

The intention was clearly to make viewing this site on the iPhone much easier.

But if the iPhone’s internet is “just the internet,” shouldn’t any moderately standards-based site work just fine?

sites do display just fine on the iphone, but there (at least) are a couple of reasons driving people to make iphone-specific mobile sites:

• no matter how awesome the rendering engine is- you are still staring at a really tiny screen. if someone is willing to manipulate the content of a website so that it reads easily on a 320px then why would you discourage them from doing so? do we really want to start taking 300 pixel wide screens into consideration when designing websites? (uh, i personally do not)
• the iphone is still yet a unique browsing experience with the ‘touch’ thing. for a user on the iphone, his or her finger is like 3-5 times the size of a mouse pointer. this is why (good) iphone-optimized sites tend to have large buttons and less clutter.