No ESCape: How One Miami Web Design Firm Positions for iPad and Web 3.0 Transitions
My new $50 Microsoft Arc keyboard has an ESCape key upper left, a DELete key upper right, and every keystroke on the composite keyboard layout between them clicks back an audible (if illusory) assurance of accomplishment. My new $500 Apple iPad, on the other hand, has no ESCape key, no DELete key, and a virtual keyboard that is consistent in neither layout nor availability. And yes, I know it's high-tech taboo to point out the irritations in innovation. With all the layout variants afforded by virtualization, though, you'd think they could've at least INSerted (also missing) ESCape and DELete keys somewhere in the mix.
But I digress...
The reality is that there is no ESCape from the iPad. And by that, I do not mean merely its apps or interface. Nor do I here bemoan that (like the Arc) the iPad is a product of migrated manufacturing "developed" in America and "assembled" in China, as the mandatory microlabel on its backside makes manifest. What I mean is that the iPad is not so much profoundly revolutionary as predictably evolutionary. And I refer not only to the programmatic progression of Apple Computer's "sell'em the razors and the blades" marketing strategy... but also to the inexorable advancement of World Wide Web Consortium ("W3C") standards for content, format and accessibility... and to the functional adherence thereto that empirical observation suggests Chairman Jobs may demand more so from competitive products than his own.
Case in point...
With its recent introduction the iPad was heralded as a W3C standards-based device, encouraging if not requiring compliance with HTML5 in general and support for HTML5 video and audio in particular while dropping Adobe Flash altogether. It is as if a line were drawn in the sand with Apple on one side, Adobe on the other, and website owners and developers expected to ally with one or the other. But choosing the one means alienating advocates of the other, and we didn't see that as good business for anyone except maybe Apple. We decided instead to support bothHTML5 video/audio as well as Flashand we developed the VA4Most.js