TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Jeffrey Zeldman doesn’t think magazine or newspapers should be native applications on the iPad:

While some of this will lead to useful innovation, particularly in the area of gestural interfaces, that same innovation can just as readily be accomplished on websites built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—and the advantage of creating websites instead of iPad apps is that websites work for everyone, on browsers and devices at all price points. That, after all, is the point of the web. It’s the point of web standards and progressive enhancement.

I think he’s right in the long-term—using HTML, CSS and javascript to develop applications for reading is preferable because it can be deployed on all devices—but right now, the biggest issue for magazines and newspapers is how to make money from their content, and native iPad applications is the best way to do that.

A native iPad application allows you to charge a price for the application, do in-app purchases and, soon, subscriptions. More importantly, though, a native application puts you in the App Store, in front of every iPad owner. That’s big.

Building a web application that’s equivalent to a native iPad application is still difficult. There’s no way to do in-app purchasing and subscriptions as easily as you can in a native application, and until that changes, there’s going to be significant incentive to build native applications.

Apple could help out by giving web applications more system access and allowing them into the App Store, but purchasing is still the issue here: how do you do cross-platform purchasing in web applications in a way that’s as efficient and easy as Apple’s native solution?