OnSwipe, a stealth startup working to allow publishers to make interactive, finger-friendly tablet versions of their online publications, has a few questions for Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad-only newspaper, The Daily: Why do you hate freedom? Why do you hate the web? And why aren’t you using our technology?

OnSwipe, led by entrepreneur and writer Jason Baptiste and backed with $1 million in venture capital, is working on technology that turns any website into an interactive, slide-and-zoom, constantly updated read on a tablet, without the need for readers to download an app as they do with The Daily, Popular Mechanics and even Wired magazine.

That model requires that users download updates via Apple’s app store and that the content is static. So, for instance, if there’s breaking news that The Daily writers cover, readers won’t get it until the app is updated the next morning.

That makes no sense to Baptiste, who in a Thursday blog post challenged Murdoch to see if a browser-based version wouldn’t be better.

“Make a version of The Daily that lives in the browser on tablet devices. Provide the same native-like experience of an app and own your user. See which version is the better business after six months,” Baptiste wrote.

Making the test even easier, Baptiste says OnSwipe already built up a rough version for Rupert, since The Daily’s content is also published on the web.

“I have an early early prototype of a web version of The Daily sitting in my hands as we speak and it rocks,” Baptiste wrote.

OnSwipe’s model works much like mobile versions of websites do: A publication’s server is set up to recognize when a swipe-enabled touch device such as the iPad is requesting a webpage, and redirects them to a different version of the site hosted by OnSwipe. And that touch-enabled site won’t just be a slightly translated mimicry of a site intended for traditional computers, but will instead feature more interactivity, bigger graphics, and dynamic content from sources such as Twitter, Quora and Flickr, according to Baptiste.

While the move is in some sense just a good P.R. stunt, Baptiste’s challenge illustrates a deep conflict on the net — apps versus HTML5. Apps close much of their data off from the rest of the web, but can better use the power of chips in mobile devices to create new user experiences. HTML5, the newest version of the web’s lingua franca has only a subset of an app’s interactivity, but remains open to the web, so that pages can be linked, shared, cut-and-pasted, bookmarked and searched for.

Last September, Wired magazine’s editor-in-chief Chris Anderson declared “The Web Is Dead,” foreseeing the app-ification of the digital world; while Wired.com editor-in-chief rebutted with his prediction “How the Web Wins“.

That battle — and the fundamentally different world views the underlying technology supports — is continuing to play out as media companies struggle to make money online, Apple and Google battle over web video formats and app store policies, and users choose sides.

OnSwipe, which is currently signing up beta users, grew out of a project called PadPressed, which turned WordPress-powered sites into swipe-able tablet-friendly websites, which he built because he considers the iPad the “most important consumer device ever.” When he and his co-founder Andres Barreto saw how popular that was, they decided to think bigger.

“There is no reason to be doing native apps,” Baptiste told Wired.com in a phone interview. “This isn’t a geeky, open source thing — it’s a publisher point of view that ‘I already have this web traffic, I want to own this experience.’ Publishers should be in control.”

OnSwipe’s five-person team of coders has been able to get HTML5 to do much of the same “crazy stuff” that an app can do, according to Baptiste, even though they are currently limited by some devices that don’t have browsers capable of “acceleration,” which allows a website to call on some of the resources of the user’s computer.

“The web is alive and well; it’s just different,” Baptiste said. “Why not have your cake and eat it too?”

OnSwipe will be free for personal bloggers and smaller sites, according to Baptiste. The site will work with bigger publishers, but Baptiste plans to generate more income as a media company (e.g. ad sales and revenue sharing) than by selling software as a service.

OnSwipe is hardly alone in envisioning tablets as the ideal device for both publishing and reading.

Earlier in the day, Yahoo announced that it would soon be releasing its tablet publication platform called Livestand. That offering is intended to let publishers create tablet versions of their website — also using HTML5, though those versions will live within the Livestand ecosystem, and be mixed in with Yahoo content on Livestand’s front page.

Photo: OnSwipe co-founder and CEO Jason Baptiste (Courtesy Jason Baptiste)