On the flip side (and I haven't used this site on iOS, so can't weigh in) the fact that Apple decided to turn over 50px of usable space at the bottom of the page to their UI and effectively make it unusable for touch events is really, utterly infuriating.
Hold on, you have to think about the users, not just of your site, but all the sites out there. It's utterly infuriating as a user to have your UI hijacked, by which I mean actions which are normally consistent across the system stopping working. And it's utterly certain that if UI can be hijacked some people will do so.
Maybe there is some perfect-world solution where, if something totally wonderful can happen if the UI would get out of the way, and the user is happy with it, it could be made to happen. But in practical terms when dealing with the Web as the messy place it is, the only realistic way to limit the damage web designers can wreak, is to strictly limit the capacity to override system interfaces.
Comments
On the flip side (and I haven't used this site on iOS, so can't weigh in) the fact that Apple decided to turn over 50px of usable space at the bottom of the page to their UI and effectively make it unusable for touch events is really, utterly infuriating.
Hold on, you have to think about the users, not just of your site, but all the sites out there. It's utterly infuriating as a user to have your UI hijacked, by which I mean actions which are normally consistent across the system stopping working. And it's utterly certain that if UI can be hijacked some people will do so.
Maybe there is some perfect-world solution where, if something totally wonderful can happen if the UI would get out of the way, and the user is happy with it, it could be made to happen. But in practical terms when dealing with the Web as the messy place it is, the only realistic way to limit the damage web designers can wreak, is to strictly limit the capacity to override system interfaces.