I just discovered that Macworld, the biggest Apple specific print magazine, has a mobile version of their Macworld.com website. Actually there are two mobile versions; one for iPhones, Palm WebOS and Android phones and a different one for everyone else.

The “middleweb”/iPhone version has the polished look of a typical iPhone Web App and includes the images and videos from the desktop site. When you follow a deep link from another site with a supported device, the mobile version of the correct page loads, preserving thematic consistency. Should you want to view the desktop version of that page however, you will run into problems. There is a “Full Macworld Site” link at the bottom of each mobile page but unfortunately it takes you to the Macworld home page, not to the desktop equivalent of the mobile page you were on.

MacWorld’s standard mobile site, which is delivered to everything from old RAZR’s to the latest BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Mobile devices, is created and hosted by third party mobile integrator mDog. It’s a bare bones, text-only affair. While it’s bad enough that images are striped rather than being resized for mobile, the complete lack of thematic consistency is much worse. External links to specific articles get redirected to the mobile homepage, effectively breaking the links. This means that if someone on Twitter posts a link to an Apple tip or tutorial in the Macworld archives and you follow that link on your BlackBerry, you end up on the Macworld homepage with no obvious way to get to the article that sparked the Twitter conversation. Macworld/mDog seem to presume separate mobile and desktop webs that will never meet, an outmoded concept from the early days of wml-only WAP. Linking is the nervous system of the Web, breaking links so they no longer point at the correct resource breaks the Web.

Filed in: Wap Review Directory – Technology/Apple

Ratings: Content Usability

Ready.mobi Score: 4 “Good”

Mobile Link: www.macworld.com