The great thing about a well-designed technology like the web is that as software improves, it gets used in new ways that extend it's original functionality far beyond what was envisioned when it was created. Case in point: I'm typing this on my porch from my iPhone, Steve.

Way back when I first started in web design, I remember thinking it was cool that you could use this thing they just added to the HTML spec called a table that suddenly opened up the possibilities for layout. Tables were horribly misused and I'm sorry to admit that I was a party to that misusal.

In our defense, web designers were by and large coming from the nascent desktop publishing industry where we commanded great control over text and images, and to enter a world where our only options involved whether to bold the text and center it. We didn't have any other tools at our disposal.

When CSS came along we were ecstatic. Finally, all the layout control we were used to was back (don't ask about fonts, that's still a sore spot).  We never imagined, however, that people would eventually be looking at these sites regularly from their mobile phones.

Because of how CSS is designed, it's up to the local browser to know what to do with the code we designers write.  If the user upgrades their browser they may be able to take advantage of better layout, but it's not entirely necessary to view the page.  In this way, content becomes more dynamic over time as the entire system of users, technology, and designers ratchet up the designs to take advantage of the new functionality over time, while ensuring that for a majority of users who do not upgrade, everything still looks good.  

It's the equivalent of having radio evolve slowly into television, but in that case it was completely hardware-dependent; a radio would never display images unless you upgraded the hardware.  That's why the web is awesome, it doesn't care how I view it.  That's called hardware-agnostic.  It's the difference between a telephone and a cell phone, one will never be able to surf the web.  And that makes me sad.

So when Steve the iPhone comes along, my web page doesn't need to be updated, just a few CSS lines that determine the media type.  It's the same way with printing pages, incidentally.  The same page is rendered differently in a browser, mobile device, and printer.  

I could use a bigger keypad, though.  As awesome and novel as typing my blog on a thumbpad is, I think it's time to stop.  Ow.