- Fullscreen enabled
Simply click the + sign in safari and "Add to Homescreen". Once that is done you will see a custom icon popup on the homescreen. Open it up and you will notice that iWebKit is now entirely fullscreen! Moreover it has a nice startup image! This is the only multi-page kit available with fullscreen functionnality.
- CSS3, the root of everything
Most advanced effects and features are made available thanks to advanced and often experimental css3 proprties. Css is the language that is used to style your html document setting for example text colors and backgrounds. Most modern browsers only have full support for css 2.1 since css3 is still under development but "webkit" based browers (it's a rendering engine) like safari and google chrome are able to use the new propertes nativly already! this opens up a whole new windows of opportunities. I will explain some of the technologies used in iWebKit in the following paragraphs.
Images? no gradients!Instead of using images to style the page like previous versions of iWebkit most images are now generated by the iphone itself. Indeed they are replaced by generated gradients. this means that the browser only has to load a couple of letters and numbers instead of loading an entire image reducing load times and, of course, the number of times the server gets "called".
Border ImagesInstead of using huge background images iwebkit is using border images. this means a small image is stretched over it's entire container making the background scalable to content and reducing image size (if they are not already replaced by a gradient!). Another "border" technology is the use of rendered round borders avoiding "corner images". All this to reduce load times of course!
Landscape and portraitLandscape position is automaticly detected by the browser and thanks to some css the size of some elements can change dynamicly. all this without the use of heavy javascript.
selecting elementsFor those really into styling webpages you can use css3 to select only certain elements; for example you could only style odd or even elements, wich I do with list styles; or only the first or last one.
Styling form elementsFinnaly it is possible to style form elements using only css. As you might have noticed the previous versions of iWebKit used javascript to style the elements wich resulted in messy and buggy results.
Other additionsThere are a lot of other minor technologies used in iWebKit like for example, generated shadows or rotated elements, all reducing the number of images needed to perfectly render the page. All these technologies are revolutionary and represent the future of the web. iWebKit is a window into that future world!