Recently, many Websites like Facebook and Meebo have announced optimization for the format of the iPhone. That seems to be splintering the coherence of the Web, just like Internet Explorer 4 did, according to a Wired Blog on Thursday. Whether that’s a problem or not is debatable.

All these iPhone optimized sites appears to belie the fact that that Safari in the iPhone is a "a real Web browser." As a result, the author suggested that the iPhone is really Internet Explorer 4 all over again, and is splintering the Internet.

The author wrote, regarding this optimization, "the more Ive been thinking about that argument, the more I realize that its exactly how Microsoft spun the proprietary, non-standard HTML features in IE 4."

The author went so far as to suggest, "The iPhone has created a division in the mobile-optimized web which is eerily similar to the days of IE 4 when many sites simply didnt work in Netscape."

TMO notes, however, there is a big difference between the use of non-standard HTML and sites that key on the HTTP User Agent. When Microsoft was at war against Netscape, they introduced many HTML elements that only Internet Explorer 4 could exploit. It’s quite a different thing to detect the iPhone with the HTTP User Agent, and divert to a different section of the HTML code base -- a code base which, in fact, complies with W3C standards for HTML.

Finally, while Apple was indeed the first company to put a real browser in a cell phone, many other manufacturers use WAP, and Websites have been generating code for that for some time.

So it seems that some companies are simply recognizing the iPhone as well and trying to attract Apple customers with the right sized page format. That is a far cry from altering or inventing new HTML standards which could splinter the Web community.