We recently highlighted Padilicious – a JavaScript library for bringing swipe support to your website – here on Code. As much as I dig the project, one of the comments discussed the idea of potentially standardizing the mobile interaction model.
I’d love to say that happen, but I’m skeptical as to if we’ll actually it. there are three reasons why.
Closed Models
As it stands now, there are a number of different vendors each producing a variety of different touchscreen devices.
Although many of them implement similar features for interaction, there’s no true, single implementation. At the lower-level, I’m sure even the implementation varies. And as vendors continue to advance their own technology, I think that they are going to be less inclined to push it out as a standard unless there is something in it for them.
As long as there are multiple, patented implementations, there will ever be a standard.
Not Even The Browsers Have It
The state of the web has come a long way in the past two decades, but we’ve not even truly adopted a standard for constructing documents that are parsed by our browsers.
As much as I advocate building pages to the W3C specification and as much as I’d love to see all of the browsers adopt the model, we’re not there yet. If we were, we’d have to do far less cross-browser testing.
At best, we have suggestions for standards. Before we can even think about adopting a standard for mobile interaction, I think we have to get our browsers adhering to a specification.
Implementation Details
Assuming that the industry was to move closer to a specification, there would still be certain issues that have to be addressed.
- Should the implementation be handled by each browser vendor? We’re currently seeing what happens when that is the case.
- Perhaps the implementation should be based off of a library, framework, or SDK. Then again, would company would be responsible for pushing that out and what’s to stop another party (or set of parties) from releasing their own framework ultimately putting right back in the position that we’re in now?
- How would this functionality be distributed? If the browsers were responsible for it, easy enough; however, if it were left up to a third-party source to provide this functionality, how would we ensure that it’d be provided across each touchscreen device?
Of course, until we come to some sort of conclusion, we can take advantage of tools such as Padilicious, Sencha Touch, or the upcoming jQuery Mobile libraries.
Then again, these are just my thoughts.
Yours?
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