I'd agree that touchscreen technology is nowhere near as ergonomic as mice and keyboards, but it has it's place in devices such as the iPad. But it's by no means perfect yet. The technology, and ways of using it, will get better.

The IR illuminated type where your pinkie interrupts the horizontal and vertical beams to give a coordinate?

In reply to a post by john2007:

The IR illuminated type where your pinkie interrupts the horizontal and vertical beams to give a coordinate?

I think that was the method used- Hewlett-Packard ruggedised video terminals for machine shop use.

We were designing some equipment for measuring components whilst still on the lathe, and the boss thought it would be a cool idea if the operator didn't have to use a keypad

It wasn't very successful (though for other reasons), and we ended up doing it a different way.

We're talking web sites here, not web applications.

I wouldn't for one minute say that a powerful web application shouldn't be allowed to use powerful features. But even many web applications now support iPads and iPhones. Those that don't have an iPad or iPhone client.

A web site needs to maximise its audience to bring in the advertising revenue and in some cases a commerce web site that is poorly designed will result in a loss of a sale.

As for text browsers, there is a case for ensuring a web site still works with text, it helps the visually impaired enjoy the web too as screen readers will use alt tags in image tags in a web page.

The site the OP was talking about was a BBC one, you can argue that such an organisation has a duty to ensure that their site is usable by all the people who have to pay the TV licence tax (which is pretty much everyone with a TV).

The site the OP was talking about was a BBC one, you can argue that such an organisation has a duty to ensure that their site is usable by all the people who have to pay the TV licence tax (which is pretty much everyone with a TV).

Jeez. Do you really suppose the fact that iPad owners can't rearrange the page matters that much? It's not as if the site is unusable in any way, just this little feature doesn't work on iPads. It's not a big deal.

That feature doesn't matter that much. But there's been some real problems with government and public service sites in the past. Thankfully much of that has changed now.

Nobody wants websites that only run with IE.

Web development is my job and one of the products I work on was written around IE and some of the management would love it to run on iPads and the like. But given so much of the code is IE specific it would take a lot of work to rewrite.

For a much easier life it is better to try to be standards compliant and use libraries like jQuery which are cross browser.

Edited by deleted (Sat 14-May-11 13:32:23)

It is nothing whatsoever to do with the browser. It is a basic OS facility. Period.

You seem fixated on it being the website designers fault. It isn't. It also applies to word processing, forum use such as this one that I have already mentioned, file and folder moving if you are doing Cloud data storage or webmail. And that's just off the top of my head.

Oh, how about FTP'ing from a memory card in the iPad to ones own website?

I'm araid that you come across as yet another person knocking the BBC just for the sake of it. (And incidently trying to pin the responsibility for the atypical behaviour of the iPad web browser on anyone but Apple.)

The BBC home web page works just fine on an iPad; the only thing that doesn't work is the added feature of being able to drag and drop components. That this doesn't work is nothing to do with cross-browser components, it is a simple fact that the web browser on the iPad doesn't support drag and drop because it hijacks the mouse-down drag event for its own purposes (to scroll the screen). That is a question, as far as I am concerned, of the browser failing to conform to normal standards rather than the web site being at fault.

This is not the only example where the iPad web browser falls short of the functionality of web browsers on real computers. It's not a particularly big deal, but there's no point in pretending that the web-browsing experience on an iPad can equal that on a full-blown computer.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that there's no problem in general with drag and drop on an iPad. Several applications do allow you to drag objects on the screen, so there's no reason why an application such as a word processor couldn't implement it.

The problem (if it is a problem) is that the iPad uses the mouse-down drag event to scroll the screen in many applications. This obviously precludes its use to also drag icons. (But I can think of several mechanisms that would allow both functions. For example, triple finger drag, or holding one finger at a particular point on the screen and dragging with the other.)

You also have to realize that you can't interact with the file system on an iPad in the same way that you can on a PC. It's the nature of the beast.

In reply to a post by AEP:

The problem (if it is a problem) is that the iPad uses the mouse-down drag event to scroll the screen in many applications. This obviously precludes its use to also drag icons. (But I can think of several mechanisms that would allow both functions. For example, triple finger drag, or holding one finger at a particular point on the screen and dragging with the other.)

Google Reader is annoying on the iPad browser, you need two finger scroll to move the article.

Also RobertoS - any FTP client on the iPad would have access only to its own data in its own area.