Can a mobile website function/look like a mobile app?

[Maximilian]

Is web technology that far along yet? Some of the UI's on apps look pretty fancy, am I aiming too high in taking design hints for a mobile website from an app?

 

[purbeast0]

not sure what you mean. you control the looks/feel of your websites with the css you write and images you make. and you will always have the address bar at the top of a browser.

 

[Rhonda the Sly]

You'll also be forced to contend with issues such as your tab getting force-closed without you having time to clean up. Access to system resources/APIs will be more limited and it's harder to maintain a native feel on the browser - especially across all three of the largest platforms.

 

[Aluvus]

A lot of mobile apps are just wrappers for a website, so the obvious answer would be "yes".

The limiting factors are going to be that some things are difficult or, less often, impossible to do with standard Web technologies, and some things may be difficult or impossible to do with reasonable performance. Especially if you don't want to be limited to browsers that support the latest bleeding-edge standards. You can do lots of fancy things with CSS transforms, for example, but browser support is not uniform and performance for some transforms may be problematic.

Without a more precise notion of what you want to do, it's hard to say much.

And of course as a matter of general principle, "fancier" does not mean "better".

 

[Simpalm]

According to me, Yes.

There are various limiting factors, which will decide the limits. We can do lots of innovative things with CSS transforms.