Making widgets and buttons finger sized is another concern.

Mobile browsers will also zoom to page width, which might also break the web developer’s design.

But I guess we’ll see less *good* design now that people think of web pages as graphics of fixed sizes rather than text files.

Even on the larger of those devices I actually like to size my own windows to something other than 1024×768 sometimes! Wouldn’t it be lovely if you could get that Facebook view by just resizing your window? (And then throwing it to the side of your desktop for background use.)

HTML/CSS was in part designed to handle this exact problem, and it doesn’t do too badly — it’s the best of all the alternatives, and it sounds as if it’s much better than the viewport tag. But HTML layout desperately needs addressing, partly for problems like this and partly for problems that have afflicted web designers (and web users) since the mid-90s.

It’s fantastic that both Gecko and Webkit support Flexbox layout now. (Mozilla should be promoting this hard! I expect to see a hacks.mozilla.org article shortly…) Flexbox can get us 50% of the way to cross-device web pages because it’s just so easy to rearrange layout without changing the markup.

And HTML5 introduces some interesting new tags that might make semantic *layout* a real possibility (although it will be tricky to do well). Being able to rearrange aside, nav, header and footer elements, etc. and optimising the view for the main content might turn out to be incredibly useful on mobile. The very common 2- or 3- column website often looks clumsy on small devices, but would be so easy to rearrange/resize by the mobile itself if it were semantically marked up.

For these reasons, I’m optimistic that the web can be unified, not just for javascript, multimedia and HTML5, but also for layout too.

Things like the viewport meta tag is one of those easy solutions that brings short-term satisfaction, but ends up screwing over users and anyone who has a hand in the development of any user agent in the long term. Being a minority share in mobile browser market should, I think, bring these kinds of issues to the forefront, and reveal that the solution is not “okay, please add in a use case for us now.”

The sentiment in your “the iPhone is not the only mobile device out there” quote and the effects displayed in the screenshots are succinct demonstrations for my disdain of the approach focused on short-term satisfaction.