“This page best viewed in…”

If that phrase doesn’t provoke a shudder of horror and loathing, it should. It’s the battle cry of the Browser Wars, those terrible and ultimately futile years at the end of the last milennium. It’s the rallying cry of those who would take the open ubiquity of the web and fragment it into a collection of gated communities, where entrance to each is predicated on running a specific browser.

“Your browser is not compatible and must be upgraded…”

All too often, because developers are too fearful or prideful or just plain lazy, they put up unnecessary barriers to entrance. They prevent people from using their sites based on choice of browser. Of course there are situations where the experience will be different—nobody expects Netscape 4 users to be able to see all 2007’s pretty CSS effects, just like table-based sites look beyond bizarre in Mosaic. That’s no excuse for sites that intentionally lock users out just because their choice of browser doesn’t line up with the developer’s expectations. It’s regressive, short-sighted, and just plain unprofessional.

“This site is for iPhone users only.”

STOP IT. Stop it right now.

The fact that optimizing pages for an iPhone makes the development of such specialized pages attractive in no way excuses lockout of other users. I might be willing to entertain the argument if the iPhone’s browser were some specialized non-web contraption. It’s not. It’s a full-fledged XHTML+CSS+DOM browser that happens to lag a bit in some implementation areas and won’t run some plugins.

Besides, if you’ve developed a version of your site (or application or whatever) that works well on the iPhone, then why in the name of Tim Berners-Lee would you deny other people that optimized experience? You might find that they prefer to interact with the site that way no matter what platform they’re using. You might find that you don’t need a separate iPhone version after all. The iPhoned version might be the only version you need.

Designers will argue that pages optimized for the iPhone screen will look bad on a desktop browser. Maybe, and maybe not, but stop preventing your users from making that decision for themselves. Nobody says you have to convert your whole site to be iPhoney. But your lockout of non-iPhone users is worse than rude. It’s stupid.

We finally learned, after much sweat and a fair number of tears, that “best viewed in” is a fool’s errand. Are we so eager to rush back into that morass and fight the war all over again?

Please. Just stop.