The word on the street (and by “street” I mean, this article in the New York Times) is that the iPhone has been generating a disproportionate amount of mobile-phone-based internet traffic at Google and other sites.

According to the article, while iPhones account for only 2% of all smartphones, there were days in late December when iPhone traffic outpaced traffic from all other smartphone platforms. While this can be explained away by post-Christmas excitement and holiday mothballing of others’ smartphones (they tend to be business tools, after all, and not much business happens between Christmas and New Years’) there is one thing that the iPhone heralds that web developers should not ignore: Real web users on mobile devices.

Of course, mobile phones have had web browsers for years. In fact, the mobile market was one of the compelling reasons to built sites in standards-compliant XHTML since the bare bones browsers on these could best represent pages in plain text using the unadorned (as in, non-styled and image-free) code of a well-constructed web page. The days, however, of being able to rely on a non-graphical representation of your web pages as the default mobile presentation will soon be over as the iPhone pushes other platforms such as Nokia’s Symbian and Windows Mobile to include much more capable browsers.

Google has prepared for this. Using their GMail client on an iPhone is downright dreamy, with the list of mail messages best accessible in the Apple phones standard (and easier-to-hold) vertical position. As more devices mimic the iPhone (it’s what the tech industry does, after all — and you don’t have to be an Apple fan boy to see it) websites will have to do a better job of presenting their entire content (images and styled text) in a mobile-friendly manner. Detecting screen sizes and orientations, not to mention the specific features available on a platform (for example, the iPhone still does not support Flash, though it may be coming soon) will allow websites to improve the experience of surfing for their users. Sure, these devices present will websites as they appear on desktop browsers; but, catering the experience to the device will only help to engender the warm, fuzzies we all want our users to feel when they interact with our websites.

So, just when you web programmers out there were getting excited by the possibility of coding a web page without having to work around Internet Explorer’s myriad bugs, in comes the phone market to complicate your lives once again. I would love to predict that these companies, having lived through the pains of browser non-compliance once, will ensure that this time, we get it right from the start.

But who are we fooling? If we thought building sites for near-limitless combination of platforms, browsers, and screen sizes on desktop machines was hair-pulling-ly frustrating, now we have a whole new class of devices for which to build. If you thought having two or three computers on his desk was a cluttered way to do browser testing, imagine your desk with a dozen or more mobile devices as you try to ensure the site works on all major smartphones. Fun for everyone!