We've been here before.
"There are perhaps three ways, one of which has been seen not to work, of making web pages look okay on a small screen. The first way, to insist that the web developer also builds a specialist handset version of its pages, just doesn’t work, as earlier version of WAP showed us.
That leaves two more possibilities, either we have the browser behave so intelligently that it can fluidly re-lay out the page, using some underlying understanding of how big text and graphics have to be on this particular sized screen for humans to be comfortable with it, or we can change the way the browser functions."
Addressing the first paragraph above: Does anyone remember that HTML, and later XML, were supposed to allow your content to render correctly in a device independent manner? And neither of those has worked, has it? I truly wonder what the conceptual deficit is in those who design software to not realise and actually solve this problem. Or have these claims always been marketecture?
Many people knew that WAP was crap before it got started. It was enough trouble trying to get basic (v3.2) HTML to render acceptably in more than one browser without having to fiddle about with another layout for WAP.
To the second paragraph: I haven't used an iPhone, so I don't know if this layout problem has been solved. I'll take your word for it. If the device independent layout problem has been solved, it seems to me that it might have been solved outside of HTML/ XML/ or whatever. But might that not freak out the web page designers who want to treat HTML as if it were DTP?
The Deepfish approach sounds really dumb. The idea of scrolling and zooming round a "map" of a web page, via the UI MS are likely to deliver, sounds hateful. I imagine having it being something akin to using streetmap.com to find the nearest off licence.