Look out specialized magazine iPad apps — you’ve got a new competitor that aims to turn any website into a touch-and-swipe experience on tablets and smartphones with just a few lines of JavaScript.

Onswipe, which launched Tuesday, works by diverting iPad, iPhone and Android phone users from a publisher’s webpage to a specialized HTML5-driven page that behaves like a custom magazine app such as Popular Science and Wired magazine’s iPad apps or The Daily’s experiment of an app as a daily newspaper.

The difference is that Onswipe does all the work – for free. Publishers choose from a range of templates; provide a way for Onswipe to get at the content in the publisher’s database; and include a short line of code in their website.

And voila! Sites get instant appification — with magazine-like ads between stories. Those ads are sold and placed by OnSwipe, which shares the majority of the revenue with the publisher.

Onswipe Demo Video from Onswipe on Vimeo.

Onswipe’s founder Jason Baptiste is aiming to be the publishing platform for any size website that wants a tablet optimized experience, without having to find a way to build apps for iOS and Android and give up subscription revenue to Apple.

“The tablet is the TV of our generation,” Baptiste said. “We think publications can get the kind of money brand advertisers are used to spending in the print world.”

Others have gone down the road of bypassing native apps for the power of HTML5. The Financial Times, for example, just released it’s own HTML5-based app, which Baptiste says is “pretty neat,” though he says it might have been wasted effort.

“Someone like The Financial Times could just use us,” Baptiste said.

And that category of sites should be nearly anyone, Baptiste says, and even better, advertisers should love it.

OnSwipe is launching Tuesday with some well-known sites, including Forbes, Slate, Stocktwits, Thomson Reuters’ PeHub, and Hearst’s Marie Claire; while advertisers include Sprint and American Express. OnSwipe only works, however, for sites that don’t charge a subscription fee.

Armed with $1 million in venture capital, Onswipe’s small group of coders have built a custom-touch-publishing JavaScript engine that outperforms native apps and doesn’t rely on Flash, according to Baptiste.

Users can flip through stories, share them and save them for later to read in My Onswipe, it’s version of ReadItLater. The site also analyzes articles to find other stories to recommend, including ones from other publications that use Onswipe.

The one drawback is that Onswipe does not work with site’s comment system, though it does show reactions from around the web, such as what people are saying on Twitter.

Baptiste downplays the drawback, saying that publishers have a queasy relationship with comments anyway.

The company says it can work with any publishing system (it originally started as a way to tabletize Wordpress-based sites) and has a backlog of 26,000 sites that want to use the service.

Android tablets are not yet being supported because there are not enough of them and their browsers are not yet of the same quality as the iPad, according to Baptiste.

Onswipe will begin letting those sites in “at random” in the coming weeks, once the company sees how it handles the millions of site visits it gets on the first day.

So look out app stores — perhaps the Web isn’t dead after all.