mTLD to enforce Web standards in .mobi

Zoxed writes "Builder.com reports that mTLD will force anyone wishing to register in .mobi will require its customers to stick to rules on how their users' Web sites are developed. Assuming this can/will be policed are there any *disadvantages* to the approach ? Could it be enforced in other TLDs ?" That is the real question: How and what effect would be done? And how sterile would an environment like that be?

Comments

What's the point?

[lpangelrob]

Why not just let the domain regulate itself?

If I go to a .mobi domain in my cell phone browser and it looks like crap, I won't go back. The website doesn't get any traffic. The company fixes it.

This isn't even bringing up the philisophical arguments of why this is a bad idea...

Re:What's the point?

[SatanicPuppy]

Yea I agree, though I wish, on some level, there was a way to enforce standards.

The reality of it is, when the TLDs start trying to enforce standards they're not going to limit themselves to XHTML or whatever, they're going to try and mandate within the existing standards, and it's going to become a nightmare of buerocracy and inefficiency.

In the end, it all comes down to the browsers anyway...Whatever looks best on your browser of choice is going to be "best designed" as far as you're concerned, and this is an unusually savvy crowd. I still get people calling me about Netscape 4.7 javascript errors.

Re:What's the point?

[Narcissus]

The problem I see is that all that will end up happening, then, is that all forms of people will start creating sites in .mobi that aren't for consumption through a mobile phone.

Hundreds of ringtone sites will pop up overnight, but only a few will actually be for use through a phone. Every other one will just be like all the ones we have now.

Then you'll have phone manufacturers setting sites there and so on, and then soon the .mobi name loses its meaning and more importantly, value for sites that are actually developed for the original target market.

That would be my guess, anyway.

Re:What's the point?

[6*7]

Imagine the market share of your browser being 1% and a mix of browsers that do work correctly in the 90+%. I can imagine a company not caring about that 1%, they have already lost the sale so why spend money to fix the problem!

Re:What's the point?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

The problem I see is that all that will end up happening, then, is that all forms of people will start creating sites in .mobi that aren't for consumption through a mobile phone.

I think this is a pretty important concern. There's no point in creating a special purpose domain set if any corporation or any entrepeneur can jump in and defeats its purpose right away.

This seems to happen a lot when a niche development goes mainstream, the companies and people that take it mainstream don't understand it and make fundemental distortions that defeat the original intent. Sometimes it is good but usually it isn't.

Re:What's the point?

[Jugalator]

This isn't even bringing up the philisophical arguments of why this is a bad idea...

It's not about censorship of content or layouts, but about making sites work with phones.

If not, they can make a website in .mobi that:

1) is not even intended to work with a phone -- do we want that for a special domain like this?

2) works with special brands of phones with special "web standard extensions". Imagine a Microsoft Smartphone with these under a snazzy name like MSX and companies starts hosting .msx documents instead because it's the Flash of mobiles. A lot of companies catches on because it's flashy and cool, and now you have the regular web but on handhelds.

Re:What's the point?

[ezzzD55J]

1) is not even intended to work with a phone -- do we want that for a special domain like this?

Sure, why not?

2) works with special brands of phones with special "web standard extensions". Imagine a Microsoft Smartphone with these under a snazzy name like MSX and companies starts hosting .msx documents instead because it's the Flash of mobiles. A lot of companies catches on because it's flashy and cool, and now you have the regular web but on handhelds.

That would suck, but using 'force' to prevent that isn't so great either.

Re:What's the point?

[Bert64]

Because if a large number of people use phone X which renders it`s own proprietary markup that`s incompatible with any other phone, then sites will pop up that use it.. Leaving those of you using phone Y screwed. Then as a result, people will think that phone Y is crap, and phone X will become more popular even if it`s a massively inferior device.

Re:What's the point?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Why not just let the domain regulate itself? If I go to a .mobi domain in my cell phone browser and it looks like crap, I won't go back. The website doesn't get any traffic. The company fixes it.

First, they are trying to add value to their domain. If users learn that sites on that domain always work with all their mobile devices they will prefer it, which will make sites there more attractive, which will lead to more value for the owners. Second, letting the free market decide works great if you have a free market. As it is, however, you have minor interference from a swarm of governments and one huge monopoly trying to embrace and control said market. MS would like nothing better than to control the mobile OS space, and thus the internet for mobile users. They have the cash to strategically break service for 20% of users in the interest of gaining long term control and profits. This is not in the best interests of the domain owners and will reduce the value of the domain. Basically, I see this as a shrewd move assuming they can pull it off and one that favors end users.

Re:What's the point?

[CompSci101]

Well, I think the internet has done a shitty job of regulating itself so far, specifically wrt the browser wars and the overwhelming dependence on Internet Explorer's busted handling of *HTML.

The web is also about interoperability, isn't it? Microsoft has done a good job trying to keep that buttoned down so far, and has subsequently made my life as a web developer miserable (judging from the complaints from other web developers, their lives are similarly unneccessarily complicated). Deliberately breaking the standard or continuing to use behavior that should be disabled by default (box model problems, doctype standards compliance switching, etc., etc.) stifles innovation instead of fostering it because you're constantly "fixing" your site to work with a crappy browser that has dominated the market for no good reason apart from inertia.

This is a serious problem. This keeps technically superior solutions/technologies from ever gaining traction.

I agree that I'm uncomfortable with having the way I develop software dictated by an outside party. But at the same time, unless someone explicitly forces these constraints on people, nothing will ever change. Making sites work properly across browsers is entirely too hard as it is on a single hardware platform (the PC) that has relatively uniform capabilities wrt display technology across nodes. Add portable devices to the mix and you can forget about most people adding support -- it's too expensive.

I say: a qualified "huzzah"

Re:What's the point?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I think the real "what's the point?" question is, will they bother to enforce standards on irc.blah.mobi?

How about on ftp.blah.mobi, or mail.blah.mobi? Wish I could bitchslap the fools.

Re:What's the point?

[gstoddart]

Because if a large number of people use phone X which renders it`s own proprietary markup that`s incompatible with any other phone, then sites will pop up that use it.. Leaving those of you using phone Y screwed. Then as a result, people will think that phone Y is crap, and phone X will become more popular even if it`s a massively inferior device.

You mean like IE or Microsoft's Java implementation?

Re:What's the point?

[ezzzD55J]

Hm, I wonder what was so trollish about that post. I wish I could metamoderate the moderations I get.

Re:What's the point?

[linwoes]

Why not just let the domain regulate itself?

Because it doesn't. If it did .com sites would be for commercial enterprises and not "A shrine to my kitty" and .org sites would not be selling me stuff to make money.

This isn't even bringing up the philisophical arguments of why this is a bad idea...

There are standards for TLD, they were just never enforced. Now people believe that if it is not a .com it is not legit. Why not adhere to some standards, espically in a domain that is resource constrained thus a missing a page becomes more expensive.

Re:What's the point?

[A.K.A_Magnet]

At first, I agreed with you. But thinking a bit more thouroughly, I came to another idea. One of the principles of the Web is that it is composed of very simple components which work great together. A webserver isn't doing much: it understands HTTP (a protocol that has nothing to do with contents, except replying their type), then delivers the requested contents.

Who is to decide the standard under which the contents are? Is it the W3C? I don't think so. First, the W3C only issues recommandations. I am an advocate of open standards and W3C validation of websites, however I think one should follow the XHTML standard if the website pages are in XHTML, and so on. But what if I decide to make a XUL application?

XUL is an open standard, but it isn't a W3C standard. Yet I can implement a Java XUL back-end on a cellphone (OK the battery will last 2 mins but that's not the point ;)), upload a XUL application on my server and then on my phone use my application as if it was local.

XUL is XML so it defines its namespace (an URI), and should be self-validating (with the help of a DTD or XML Schemas). XML is a W3C standard. So would the .mobi validating agent allow XUL applications? Who are they to decide what I put on my webserver?

OK this is Slashdot so let's talk about Microsoft. I often see posts like "When you [FOSS people] do [something], it's right but when MS does it they are evil" and it pisses me off because it's an extreme simplication of the problem and it's a FALSE statement in a cartesian reasoning. If we reverse the problem and think XAML instead of XUL, to me, it's bad of course, but only ethically: Microsoft has perfectly the right to make their website in XAML I think, I would just find it wrong because XAML isn't an open standard (and if they license it, they will make sure it's not GPL compliant to piss us off ;)) and because I am an open standards advocate. Yet who are/am WE/I to decide that MSFT shouldn't push XAML? To me it sure looks like a good business move, perfectly in line with their previous actions.

However, when MS changes HTML or parses HTML badly so that they can push web developpers to make non standard-compliant websites, this is definitely wrong both ethically and technically (and as we saw, legally). This is their "Embrace & Extend" technique and we all (I guess) hate it. If they had forked HTML and called their shitty HTML "MSHTML-4" it would have been less of a problem, but since HTML was a loosy language and that nobody used the DTD declaration, we arrived where we are now in a Web where 1/10 websites are standard compliant, and with advocates like us who tell everyone that validating on W3C is a must. In a Web where developping a new Web browser is one of the hardest tasks because of the shitty undocumented MS HTML.

I understand that .mobi wants to avoid that to happen again, especially when their is no real OS monopoly on the cellphones market yet (so the web browsers shares may be more equal). But I don't think enforcing standards is the solution, or if they do it, they'd better do it right; even the W3C validator doesn't fully understand all of the standards, and Content-types should be checked so that if I decide to invent my own standard (may it be or not XML based), if I make it open (that's an ideological requirement MS wouldn't agree with :)), they should allow my website.

Well I'm over here, there's a lot to say but I'm not sure it's useful (and the more we say, the more we may be misunderstood :)). I hope I made my point: open standards are good, automatic enforcement is bad (well it may not be bad, but I'm pretty sure the validation robots will by crappy and limited so it is bad..)

Re:What's the point?

[yasgo]

UK users pay the equivalent of more than 3 US Dollars per Megabyte when using a handheld mobile device to access the Internet. Consumers do not want to be paying that sort of money to access sites that they cannot then use.

I would want a refund on my phone bill from the network operator if my device was fed a load of junk and they tried to bill me for it even though I could not use it, and I am sure some scam would soon ensue....

Re:What's the point?

[SeaFox]

If I go to a .mobi domain in my cell phone browser and it looks like crap, I won't go back. The website doesn't get any traffic. The company fixes it.

But not all phones use the same browser. What if a browser that does not display the site the same as others becomes the market leader because the phone brand it is tied to gains market share? The other phones may lose business as sites are written to display best in that browser. Then other phone brands either must adopt that browser or emulate it's rendering, no matter how flawed it may be, because that's what people will be expecting, and if it doesn't people will think the phone's internet abilites are broken.

Did you just feel that chilly breeze of déjà vu, too?

Re:What's the point?

[Jules Mercuri]

But I'd still want the option to view a .mobi site on a real computer. The way WAP is set up, I can't do that without an emulator. I've always been curious about how WAP looked on a non-phone. It'd be great if we could have one of these for the "real" internet. Like a .css for all those trendy sites that are XHTML 2.0 and CSS 4 compliant... in 2005... You know the ones. Those kinds of designers would go for forced standards.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

I did not use my mod points on your post, but I think that "-1, Troll" may be appropriate. Your post was definitely not informative and "answering" a question with "Sure, why not?" is not really contributing to the debate. It's like saying "I disagree" without explaining why. You state your opinion. Fine. But the way you state it does not add much to the debate and would probably encourage trollish comments.

let the market decide!

[yagu]

One of the fundamental underpinnings of the internet is its openness. That's not exact terminology but describes the internet's zen. Creating .mobi for specific use makes sense, the mobile world is almost ready for that. Establishing strict guidelines helps define a consistent (and predictable) mobile web experience, but strict policy flies in the internet zen's face.

Give designers free reign, let them create, let them innovate. Extend the freedom and define the extension as mobile friendly, but don't define what mobile friendly is to the web site creators.

As in the other TLD worlds, creativity has served to enhance and extend the web experience beyond many's expectations. .mobi should be no different, and constraining .mobi with policy weakens its potential. Let the free market and competing ideas dictate the policy.

The mobile user community will vote with their smart-text pads as to what is the most effective web site.

Also, there are unknown (now) reasons to create any kind of web site presence in .mobi.

Let the market decide!

Re:let the market decide!

[KDR_11k]

Look at the normal internet. All those stupid IE-only pages that are incompatible because of ignorant people deciding everyone has IE. By allowing only standards compliant material you avoid browser-specific sites and prevent browser companies from fragmenting the market. Since the mobile browsers are still developing and cross-platform compatibility on mobiles is difficult it makes sense to enforce the standards and allow browser writers to implement only the standards without stupid failsafe code that's needed because some popular browser implemented it once and noone bothers to check those parts of the code. So therefore, if "this page does not render correctly in Opera" that's the fault of Opera, not because the webmaster decided that everyone uses "IE" (I know, on mobiles the distribution is different) and he can get away with wrong HTML that IE renders the way he likes it.

Re:let the market decide!

[Chubby_C]

creativity with the site design may also force the handset makers to build in more robust browsers in their devices

Re:let the market decide!

[Rich0]

We already know what it will look like if domain owners are given free reign - we might as well drop the registrar and just do a zone transfer from .com...

Anybody with a .com/net/whatever site will just register the corresponding .mobi domain and point it at their regular webserver. Viola, the mobile migration is over, and mobile users still won't be able to find sites to go to...

If you want to drive mobile sites you should not only restrict content to certain standards, but you should also revoke ownership of any domain that doesn't have bona-fide content in 6 months after registration. (No under-construction pages allowed.) So, if Ford wants to keep ford.mobi they actually have to make a mobile website. If they don't then it goes up for grabs and Chevy can register it and put whatever they want on it as long as it is mobile-standards-compliant.

Just a thought. It seems like all the new TLDs are just opportunities for registrars to make more money as all the .com owners register yet another pointer to the same IP. I'd be open to anything that would break that cycle...

Re:let the market decide!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen

Re:let the market decide!

[vertinox]

As in the other TLD worlds, creativity has served to enhance and extend the web experience beyond many's expectations. .mobi should be no different, and constraining .mobi with policy weakens its potential. Let the free market and competing ideas dictate the policy.

What about .gov and .edu?

Those TLDs aren't market solutions. Remember regulation is always a market solution because the market has choose (or is willing) to let it be regulated.

  Although, I've always wanted my own government agency webpage...

Agreed. Let the viewers decide with their "hits".

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

If a site isn't phone-broswer friendly, people will not return. No need to inject a layer of "regulation" (whatever that means) into the mix.

TLD?

[b100dian]

you mean Exteded TLD, right?

Re:TLD?

[m50d]

you mean Exteded TLD, right?

No he doesn't, not only is there no such word as "Exteded", but TLD stands for "Top Level Domain", which .mobi certainly is. Try again.

Re:TLD?

[jacksonj04]

TLD is Top Level Domain, regardless of if it's country or not.

What about outdated/old technology?

[garcia]

mTLD announced today that it has joined the W3C and will be using many of the consortium's best practices, developed for the mobile Internet, to develop its own criteria in order to ensure .mobi sites are optimised to be viewed on mobile devices.

Why wouldn't the market determine the criteria? What if the criteria that mTLD comes up with is outdated or improper? I have written a simple web application that is mobile friendly for WAP and regular browsers but I would assume that WAP is going to be left behind for proxied content or full support browsers.

Why would you want to force compliance of crappy or unused technology on an entire TLD?

Re:What about outdated/old technology?

[KDR_11k]

As said above, otherwise nothing is stopping people from putting normal websites on .mobi and mobile users won't be sure whether a .mobi page is actually compatible with mobile phones or just some idiot looking for a new domain to put his porn site/goatse redirector/blog onto.

Re:What about outdated/old technology?

[garcia]

As said above, otherwise nothing is stopping people from putting normal websites on .mobi and mobile users won't be sure whether a .mobi page is actually compatible with mobile phones or just some idiot looking for a new domain to put his porn site/goatse redirector/blog onto.

As also said elsewhere, it's not up to the TLD to police the format of the sites. It's up to the market to decide whether or not a particular website succeeds or fails.

With *so* many different methods to browse via a mobile device (proxy corrected content, WAP, full support, etc) there are too many factors that the TLD, webdesigners, and mobile device manufacturers have to take into account. In this instance, the TLD could eliminate innovation if they don't support or accept a new mobile browsing format.

Perhaps they want to force only WAP support on all their sites. That would suck.

Re:What about outdated/old technology?

[TheRaven64]

Most people on mobile 'phones are paying a lot for bandwidth. I pay something like £1/MB. If I go to a site and it doesn't display on my device, then it may have cost 10p or so for nothing. Do this a few times, and it works out to be a lot. This way, I know that any site with a .mobi domain will work with any standards-compliant device. Any other site is still a lottery, but at least I can be sure of some sites.

Re:What about outdated/old technology?

[DemingBuiltMyHotRod]

Why wouldn't the market determine the criteria?

Tragedy of the commons.

Re:What about outdated/old technology?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Why wouldn't the market determine the criteria?

Because a major player in said market is a monopoly that has a history of abusing that monopoly and of intentionally breaking standards, web standards, in order to illegally extend that monopoly?

Why would you want to force compliance of crappy or unused technology on an entire TLD?

Who is to say what is crappy and what is not? They are enforcing standards, not technology per se. This makes the sites universally readable by anyone who obeys standards and hopefully provides a level playing field for phone and software makers, while invalidating the tactic of intentionally extending and breaking those standards to create incompatibility that benefits one player. Basically, this keeps MS from using Frontpage and their mobile OS to dominate the space with a broken, de-facto standard that pushes all the other players out of the space. Letting the free market decide only works when you have a free market, not when you have a monopoly trying to extend into the space. This in turn adds value to this particular TLD from the end-user perspective and consequently from the perspective of web site operators.

Re:What about outdated/old technology?

[KDR_11k]

.edu doesn't allow porn. .mobi doesn't allow websites that won't display on mobiles. Since displaying on mobiles is the purpose of anything attached to that domain it makes sense to make sure it does.

Re:What about outdated/old technology?

[Anonymous Coward]

As also said elsewhere, it's not up to the TLD to police the format of the sites.

Oh, there's your problem. You're operating under a misguided assumption. The TLD can set pretty much whatever rules they like regarding their TLD as long as they are "equitable and fair" about it. They cannot force everyone to use WAP (as they cannot require the use of any "particular application, protocol, or product"), but other than that it's pretty fair game.

http://www.icann.org/icp/icp-1.htm

Re:What about outdated/old technology?

[shutdown -p now]

Why wouldn't the market determine the criteria?

Because the market has already failed miserably in other TLDs. Every time I see another website which does not render properly in neither Opera nor Firefox, I think that standards should really be more than just recommendations. It sure would make my life easier.

Re:What about outdated/old technology?

[meringuoid]

I pay something like £1/MB. If I go to a site and it doesn't display on my device, then it may have cost 10p or so for nothing.

Try browsing via wap.google.com. It converts webpages to mobile-friendly format on the fly, does a pretty decent job of it, and breaks them down into short chunks so that if, on reading the first one, you realise the page won't be useful, then you haven't wasted your money downloading all 200k of it...

URL inspectors

[isa-kuruption]

URL inspectors are pretty common, specifically the w3c validator for HTML/CSS. So why not for .mobi extensions? Some application can dump all the .mobi domain names, query them all and run a validator, send warning emails to admins... and eventually, cut their domain off of the network.

Can this be enforced for other domains? Sure. Will it? Unlikely. Since the intent of .mobi is for mobile-based web browsers, it kind of makes sense that it would be restricted. However, some standard domain names (like .com) may not even have web addresses, maybe only email.

.m

[jpx7777]

It would have been nice if they had made this .m instead of .mobi, just for the sake of if your on a mobile device it would be nice to type less, but I guess my next phone with have a qwerty keyboard on it anyway...

Re:.m

[PeteDotNu]

Nah, your next phone will have voice recognition. It's just around the corner...

Re:.m

[jpx7777]

I hope its better than my local electric/gas company's voice recognition. -What can I help you with?

"Pay Bill"

-I'm sorry?

"PAY BILL"

-I'm sorry, I'm having some trouble understanding, would you like to speak to a representative?

"YES"

-Thank you for calling *click*

Re:.m

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes! Then we could compile whole domains as Objective-C or Matlab code!

Re:.m

[ldspartan]

Have you ever used a system liek that which actually worked? Its like magic.

If I recall, T-Mobile has a great voice recognition system.

- What can I help you with?

"Bluetooth internet set up."

- I think you want to set up internet access via bluetooth. Do you want to do this with a laptop or a PDA?

"Laptop"

- Please hold on while I connect you to someone who knows exactly what to do.

Re:.m

[airdrummer]

it rilly should b .mbl

abbreviations always toss vowels...isn't hebrew like that?

Unenforceable

[dnixon112]

Do they really have the kind of manpower that would be required to keep checking sites over and over if this TLD gets any kind of popularity? Seems like a really dumb idea.

Re:Unenforceable

[Fallen Kell]

Have you even heard of programming? Its pretty simple to write a program to verify a documented structure. It is basically a bunch of case statements and parsers, which is no different then any high level software language compiler (in other words that piece of software that changes your code into machine code).

Re:Unenforceable

[Alioth]

Virtually no manpower. The only manpower needed will be to delete the DNS entries of those who are out of compliance.

HTML/XHTML validators already exist. A simple script that periodically validates all sites, and automatically emails the technical contact for any out of compliance site is needed - and eventually tells the .mobi administrators if it remains out of compliance outside of a given period. Or perhaps automatically drops the DNS entries for the domain.

Re:Unenforceable

[Walkiry]

Actually I think he has a point. Think of trying to do this over the, say, .com list of domains. It'd be a HUGE list, it'd take gobs of bandwidth and computer resources, and think that you'd have to keep running these checks regularly because webpages are constantly updated. Those systems aren't going to maintain themselves. If .mobi proves to be popular enough, it would indeed require a good chunk of resources, including manpower, to keep the sites in check. But I don't think there's much to worry just now, true :-)

Kick ass.

[Audigy]

As an owner of a Treo 650, I am sick and tired of going to any website (ahem, slashdot) that takes 2-3 minutes to load... and then after it loads, renders the text like
t
h
i
s.

I look forward to a more mobile-friendly chunk of the Internet, and this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Re:Kick ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

Luxury!

When I load slashdot, it looks like:
t
h
i
s
.

BTW, my secret word was "prizer"

Re:Kick ass.

[stinkykitten]

You don't try to drive up Pike's Peak http://www.ppihc.com/ with a tricycle. Don't try to view websites with a phone. Web design is standardizing at 1024x768 now. If you don't have the right equipment, don't bother coming to the party.

Re:Kick ass.

[garcia]

As an owner of a Treo 650, I am sick and tired of going to any website (ahem, slashdot) that takes 2-3 minutes to load... and then after it loads, renders the text like: t h i s

You know, Slashdot *used* to load just fine on my T-mobile sidekick with the settings I used on my desktop. Then they went to the new CSS site and now it loads poorly.

I just wish there were options available on all sites to allow you to have it display the way you want (i.e. mobile).

Taco, I know you had/have a Sidekick. Enable the option to use the Frames/HTML that you had prior to CSS.

Re:Kick ass.

[boldtbanan]

This won't have any effect on your problem since it only applies to the .mobi TLD and /. is not on that domain (although they may create a trimmed-down version explicitly for it, which would alleviate your problem with or without the forced compliance to standards). Besides, isn't it your problem if you try to view a feature-rich website in your cell phone? Should we make all websites display nicely on a 1.5 sq. inch screen? Obviously not. Companies that want to provide mobile-friendly versions of their website will create one with the .mobi domain and that 'may' display nicely on your phone. I say 'may' because there are so many screen size variations that it's pretty hard to create something that displays nicely for everyone and isn't just a bunch of text (and even text can be a problem if there are very long words involved -- think 'antidisestablishmentarianism') Just because you can do something, that doesn't mean everyone needs to cater to you, especially when there is so much change taking place in the cell-phone browser area that it hardly makes sense to develop sites for public consumption over a cell phone yet. It's enough of a pain in the ass to design regular sites for IE/Firefox/Safari with/without javascript, which display nicely on screen resolutions from 640x480 to 1280x1024+, using CSS with all the required browser hacks.

Standards may help, but there will also be hacks to get around them (think CSS hacks in current browsers) and everything will always display slightly differently on different browsers because it is not in any company's interest to be just like all of the competition. Everyone wants to add something the other guys can't do, especially in web design.

As for your download speed problems, that's between you and your provider, and it will get better over time. If /. takes 2-3 minutes to load, standards won't help you unless images are banned from the .mobi domain.

Re:Kick ass.

[MightyYar]

That's silly - you might as well tell blind users to get bent as well. As a web user, not a developer, I want to remind web developers that what we want is content. Many developers seem to concentrate on fluff. Fluff is pretty and might hook me initially, but it won't keep me coming back. I think maybe a page that can't render plain text content on the screen of a phone is more fluff than it is substance.

I read slashdot just fine with "links" on the command line sometimes, so why can't the page be rendered on a phone with graphic capabilities? How hard is it to make the "sidebar" appear only at the top and bottom when a user has a mobile phone? You are fighting a losing battle if you are trying to make your page look the same on every computer or device.

Re:Kick ass.

[stinkykitten]

I'm so tired of this attitude that websites must be accessable to all web-enabled devices and to all those with any disablility. Stupidity is just as much a disability as blindness but I'm not going to stop using words above a 3rd grade level to allow them to understand my content. If making your content "accessible" is important to a target market or because of organizational policy, then that is what you do. If appealing to that segment is not important to you then nothing should make you feel like you should or force you into doing it.

Design for the lowest common denominator is a bad thing.

Re:Kick ass.

[Animaether]

Why don't you load the RSS and/or Slashdot Light ?

Re:Kick ass.

[TheRaven64]

I know nothing about the device in question, so please feel free to ignore this post if it is not relevant:

The new site requires you to first download an HTML document, then parse it, then download the CSS files, then render. The old site just required you to download, parse and render the HTML.

Since mobile devices have a relatively high latency and a low bandwidth, this can take a while, since you can't correctly display the page until you have issued at least two not-very-overlapping HTTP requests. You might be able to get better performance if you could set your device to cache CSS files more aggressively - maybe even run a simple web cache on the device and connect via that.

Re:Kick ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

Design for the lowest common denominator is a bad thing.

Sure, but designing so that things degrade nicely is a good thing, and HTML and CSS make it very easy if you have any clue what you're doing. If it were as easy to have content in stupidese as well as normal speech (machine translation isn't quite there yet), it would be sheer boneheadedness not to.

Writing HTML that only works on one type of device is just dumb, and so is anyone who thinks that 1024x768 is any kind of standard. There's no reason your design can't be fluid.

Re:Kick ass.

[garcia]

Because it loaded and looked just fine (identical to what I was used to) prior to the CSS overhaul. I don't want to change the look and feel of how I browse every day so that I am able to read Slashdot on the road.

Make it an option to disable CSS.

Re:Kick ass.

[Animaether]

Wouldn't it be just as reasonable for Slashdot management to tell you to get a better phone ?

Keeping up maintenance on the old slashcode takes time (and money). As does serving the pages which are larger than the new CSS-enabled pages. Would you be willing to pay them to do this and pay for the bandwidth costs involved ?

Re:Kick ass.

[MightyYar]

I can't believe you just compared stupidity with blindness.

They are mutually exclusive. You can have a reader on your web site who is brilliant, yet can't read for some reason. Do you spend the few extra hours on your site to allow this reader to access your content (and your ads)? That is a business decision for you to make, but don't pretend that people are coming to your site because of the layout.

Phones are the same deal. Slashdot could spend a few hours making their site readable on a phone by killing off the stupid formatting and just spitting out generic html (like they seem to do for text browsers). They don't seem to, and that's fine - it's their business decision. But no one comes to slashdot for the layout.

I'm simply arguing that when you give up potential readers for the purposes of trying to make your site look the same everywhere, you are generally making a bad business decision. You are trading a small amount of work for accessibility in exchange for some loss in readership. Unless you have a really good way to determine that cost/benefit ratio, you really should assume that loosing readers is bad.

Obviously this does not apply to a multimedia site. However, most web sites seem to be primarily text-based. In most cases, the text is the content, not the layout.

Re:Kick ass.

[Mr_Silver]

As an owner of a Treo 650, I am sick and tired of going to any website (ahem, slashdot) that takes 2-3 minutes to load... and then after it loads, renders the text like
t
h
i
s.

If you want to read Slashdot on your pda or phone then I don't believe there is currently any better way than by using Avantslash.

However I do admit I am a little biased :)

Re:Kick ass.

[smoker2]

As an owner of a Treo 650, I am sick and tired of going to any website (ahem, slashdot) that takes 2-3 minutes to load...

Why don't you use this version then ?

Re:Kick ass.

[Random832]

I think the word you're looking for is "orthogonal" - "mutually exclusive" implies that stupid people can't be blind, and that blind people can't be stupid.

Adhering to standards? Nice change!

[NickFitz]

I don't see that anybody should have a problem adhering to standards when putting their content online. Telling people to do low-level technical stuff properly is hardly going to stifle innovation... unless you believe that such 1997 tricks as using multiple <body> tags with different bgcolor attributes to create an irritating flashing of colours was somehow innovative, rather then just stupid.

Pity those who try to use Front Page to create their mobile-friendly sites...

Re:Adhering to standards? Nice change!

[ckendrick]

If standards-policing were applied to normal web content, many AJAX interactions would potentially be outlawed, eg, Google maps. Also consider that sometimes you have to violate a standard to allow backward compatibility with broken browsers. Of course, it all comes down to how it's applied. If they are just trying to frighten management into some level of checking as to whether standards are being followed, great. Yanking registrations for carefully considered violations of standards would probably result in people putting up standards-compliant redirects to other domains :)

Headline mod for -1 flamebait

[Anonymous Coward]

"....mobi will require its customers to stick to rules on how their users' Web sites are developed... how sterile would an environment like that be?"

Probably real sterile, like, say CSS Zengarden, or some austere, clinical place like that.

Standards have nothing to do with how cold or airless your design is. In fact, I would suggest that the best and most vibrant designers care about them more than anybody. The headline lacks this basic clue.

No disadvantages

[jiushao]

One disadvantage I can think of is that it is none of their fucking business. They are not there to police the content.

Re:No disadvantages

[Anonymous Coward]

and you're not forced to use it. I for one, welcome (nope, not them) this requirement. The standards have been ignored before and this has made the non-mobile internet development arena stagnant. There's so much crap that needs to be supported in quirks mode rendering on browsers that it has led to development being stifled and bloated browsers that are difficult to maintain (IE's rendering engine?). If the standards were adhered to, much code on all browsers could be removed. Not going to happen but that's not the point.

It's a new field with new rules. on top of that you would need to spend MUCH less time developing for different browsers because standardisation would actually work, unlike the current situation where alterations do need to be made to get some slightly more complex things to work in that bastard child browser, IE.

Re:No disadvantages

[Xarius]

Then don't fucking use them. No one is making you. And they can do what they like with their domains. If they don't like how you're using it, they can tell you to fucking go away.

Re:No disadvantages

[jiushao]

Seems people have some problems with reading comprehension here so I will try to spell things out in small easily digested pieces:

• The original post asks: "Assuming this can/will be policed are there any *disadvantages* to the approach?".
• To which I reply roughly: "I think it is very real disadvantage if service providers decide to police things I do that are not directly related to the service they provide."

Now given this I think you might also figure out that me not using them does not make the disadvantages of the idea go away.

Re:No disadvantages

[That's Unpossible!]

When you buy a .mobi domain, you're buying a booth at a tradeshow.

In exchange for being promoted to a select group of people (mobile phone users), you are required to follow certain rules. If you don't like it, setup shop at another trade show (.com).

Re:No disadvantages

[jiushao]

I'll make one more attempt.

The choices A and B exists. A person asks me: "Do you see any problem with B?". I answer: "Yes, B has property X which is bad.", you argue: "But you can pick A instead, therefore there is nothing wrong with B.".

The fact that I have other options is not in any way the point, the fact that they can require whatever they want is not the point either. I am stating in response to the original question that I consider them policing the content which is not directly related to the service a disadvantage in itself. Web standards are not holy, going on crusades for them just looks silly.

Re:No disadvantages

[That's Unpossible!]

And let ME try again. Them policing the content IS PART OF THE SERVICE.

Re:No disadvantages

[jiushao]

I don't think you quite understand what "service" means, this part of the agreement is clearly not any kind of service. It is rather on the payment end. And as such it is clearly a disadvantage.

Re:No disadvantages

[That's Unpossible!]

Ummm... the service I am referring to is the fact that users will know a .mobi address is phone-safe. Just as they know they can go to a tradeshow, and all the booths at the show will adhere to certain standards.

Re:No disadvantages

[jiushao]

But that is a service to someone else, that I could have provided by my free will if I had wanted. It is a disadvantage to the service given to me. Which makes it a genuine disadvantage to the service I am getting.

Corporate internet?

[HishamMuhammad]

This seems to go against my favorite aspect of the internet: the fact that anyone, individual people, can publish whatever they want in it. Having any kind of organization controlling the "quality" of websites (even if only in structure/syntax and not content/semantics) means that things like geocities.mobi/user, mit.mobi/~student and something.sourceforge.mobi would be essentially impossible.

An internet without this kind of content would be extremely different from what we've grown used to. Hemos hit the nail in the head, "sterile" indeed.

Re:Corporate internet?

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

Complying with standards is not burdensome, it's good for business. Keep in mind that the .mobi USERS are paying by the minute to look at those domains ... it is the MOBI administration's best interest to make sure that the CUSTOMERS of the mobile phone companies are kept happy. If the .mobi domains become known for rendering badly or not at all, the consumers will stop using it.

If the initial HTML is consistent and well-coded, it is possible to deliver a mobile phone version of it ... minus much of the eye candy, but with content intact. I've seen the standards for mobile - they don't preclude a GOOD designer from delivering attractive, perhaps even astounding pages. They do take into consideration the limited display ability of the phones.

Re:Corporate internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry but how hard is it to visit the validator on w3 and keep on making changes till it passes?
The error messages are quite clear (ie <ul> end tag not found) so it shouldn't be that much of a burden to develop complient sites. The only problem with this however is the amount of "hacks" that are required to work in IE - that's where the real challenge lies - making the monoply release something that abides by the rules.

I know the two are totally different but you wouldn't try and drive a car without knowing the basics in how to operate it, hence building a website should require at a minimum a basic understanding of the technology behind it and now just clicking a few buttons and typing in your content and "hold onto your nuts and hope".

New 404?

[stuckinarut]

Error 404

The page you requested can not be displayed properly on your phone. Please contact the site administrator to advise them to change the content.

Re:New 404?

[Anonymous Coward]

Errr, 404? Why that? If you want to use an http status code, a 5xx would seem to make more sense here...

Re:New 404?

[cuerty]

That's a http error code, the http protocol defines it and it's server side.

Client side errors are handled the way the client think it's correct, so they can display more clean messages like "this website isn't supported by this client" or something like that.

Re:New 404?

[Bogtha]

That's not a 404. 404s mean that the resource doesn't exist. An error code for what you describe already exists; 406 Not Acceptable. It means the resource exists, but not in a form acceptable to the client.

Right now, the mobile web is an unfriendly place. You think the incompatibilities between normal web browsers is bad? Multiple that by a hundred, and then factor in the cost of buying the devices and maintaining service for them just so you can test in them.

While forcing web authors to adhere to spec. is probably a good move, the incompatibilities of the clients people use is a much bigger problem.

The whole concept is flawed

[caudley]

When the web was created, there was no need for a .www domain. Email doesn't run on the .smtp domain. If providers want to have a way to identify sites that are mobile content, why not just have a convention of using mobi.site.com (similar to www.site.com) and by convention mobile browsers can try mobi.site.com when the user types site.com (if site.com didn't return any usable content). Creating a whole new TLD and setting up body to monitor and police the content? Somebody got seriously bureaucracy happy.

Re:The whole concept is flawed

[Amouth]

Flaw in your idea (while it makes sence to mee), if you take yoursite.com and make mobi.yoursite.com

they don't make more money off of you becuse you only need yoursite.com

Re:The whole concept is flawed

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that done already ?
I seem to have seen mmm.somedomain.com URLs for mobile (WAP) content. And I found that when I go to hotmail (ehm, to read the wife's e-mail) on my PDA I get redirected to www.hotmail.com/mobile (or something similar, can't remember exact URL), I suppose based on browser tag. I think that is how it should work: use the normal URLs you're used to and let the site owner redirect you to the most appropriate format for your client. If not mobile version is available you can still scroll through the full-blown version.

It's gray, as usual

[k0de]

It depends on how far they go. All TLDs currently have rules, even if not enforced. For example they must conform to some level of the HTML standards. This isn't 'policed' as much as your site can't generally be read if you don't have an open body tag.

With that said, it may make more sense to let .mobi viewing devices govern what they will and will not view. This will become especially important as devices' screens grow in size, and the 'standards' need to grow to match. If mTLD poke their nose in this area, they better be very lax on their choice of restrictions.

Then there's spyware. I won't complain at all if restrictions prevent spyware from making it's way to mobile devices. Again, however, maybe this is best left to the device.

Re:It's gray, as usual

[Anonymous Coward]

>All TLDs currently have rules, even if not enforced. For example they must conform to some level of the HTML standards.

I think you are mistaken. It is NOT a requirement that you provide HTML content, or even support the HTTP protocol, to register a domain with most (any?) of the current TLDs.

You sir, are FOS.

This is so misguided

[MatD]

This is so misguided. Viewing a web page in a mobile device will be drastically different from phone to phone to pda, to web ipod (just wait, it's coming). Web page developers are going to have to resort to large conditionals based on the device viewing the page, and invariably, it will require breaking 'standards' to get a page to view correctly in the latest and greatest mobile device.

Plus, it's just kinda lame to force arbitrary rules on people.

Re:This is so misguided

[Xarius]

If you even had the slightest clue, you'd realise the best way to get a website to display consistently, and degrade properly, across the board is to code tightly to standards.

The degredation is key. If you design some slapstick javascript cack rife with tables it's going to look shit on everything except MSIE 5.7 (for example)

Re:This is so misguided

[ptlis]

You're entirely missing the point. The idea behind this is likely be specifically to avoid such horrible, unmaintainable conditional serving of webpages depending on the device that we saw in the late 90s. Stict HTML 4.01 should be viewable on any browser worth it's existance whereas non-standard propriatary elements will be by their very nature targetted at a single browser, thus requiring the very conditional serving of content that you seem so worried about.

As for an arbratary rule, in this case I think the benefit of it's existance outweighs any percieved issues with it's existance.

Re:This is so misguided

[Trolling4Columbine]

Web developers who are using duplicate code and/or conditionals either need to educate themselves on web standards, educate their bosses on web standards, or find a new line of work. Not to sound like a W3C zealot or anything, but there's really no good reason not to adhere to standards. And no, compatibility with outdated, non-compliant browsers isn't a good reason.

The power of consistency

[G4from128k]

Assuming that a TLD chooses standards that users like, they might be much more successful than other TLDs. A regulated TLD could be both more trustworthy (assuming some policing for good business practices, antivirus, etc.) and more useful (assuming the use of a pleasing, consistent look and feel).

Requirements don't imply sterility as long as the the structure provides room for creativity. Are sonnets or haiku or limericks considered "sterile" because they have strict rules on structure?

This is what DNS is!!!

[John.P.Jones]

You see when an organization is permitted to manage any DNS domain it has sole authority over how to hand out and revoke names contained within that domain. The US government, having authority over .gov can do what it likes to it. The owners of this website own the domain slashdot.org and can adhere to whatever draconian standards they like.

So society has just given .mobi to a group that will ensure that when they give out a sub-domain the recipient follows an agreement to publish a mobile friendly website on www.whatever.mobi.

There is nothing groundbreaking or out of the ordinary about this.

they should have done that...

[zogger]

... a long time ago with HTML in general. Would have avoided a lot of nonsense on the web. Develop any browser or web enabled app you want, as long as it meets open specs of useability and access for the public internet.

Enforce all the TLDs?

[Monoman]

Wouldn't it be nice to see all of the TLDs enforced? Slashdot could be the first to go because they are sitting on a .org and are clearly a business.

How about utilizing the country codes TLDs more effectively like some .com.tw and .co.uk we see quite often. DNS name space is *kinda* like IP space. Neither were designed to handle the size they have become. IPv6 may fix IP space someday but what do we do about the DNS name space?

Will they block DNS for non-compliant sites?

[khasim]

I think the first question would be ... what happens if your site is deemed "non-compliant".

If they do nothing, then this is all useless banter anyway.

If they do block non-compliant sites then I can see them having a lot of court battles on their hands.

Big time stupid move whichever approach they take.

Re:Will they block DNS for non-compliant sites?

[FLEB]

If they do block non-compliant sites then I can see them having a lot of court battles on their hands.

Not if you agreed to abide by standards when you registered the name. Of course, this is assuming that they have a specific plan with solid guidelines in place before .mobi goes live, and spell that out in detail to prospective buyers.

Re:Will they block DNS for non-compliant sites?

[BlogPope]

I think the first question would be ... what happens if your site is deemed "non-compliant".

I would imagine you would receive a notice to correct the problem. After 6 months and 9 gentle reminders, you forfeit the domain. Of course if you whine that you are trying, etc. you'll be able to buy more time.

If they do block non-compliant sites then I can see them having a lot of court battles on their hands.

It would fall under contract law, and a simple clause requiring arbitration would keep almost everything out of the courts. They would win all arbitration because the contract would specifiy far more aggressive terms for reclaiming the domain name.

Big time stupid move whichever approach they take.

For almost every successful product/company, there is somebody who said that in the development stage.

Re:Will they block DNS for non-compliant sites?

[rizzo420]

and who's gonna monitor all the .mobi sites?

Re:Will they block DNS for non-compliant sites?

[canon006]

A small shell script that runs constantly, checking sites with a validator (like the w3c already has, we are talking about websites, they'll be written in XHTML, WML, or some newer mark-up language) and emailing the names of sites that fail validation to the administrators for further investigation. It's not a complicated thing, you prevent taking down falsely non-compliant sites by requiring human intervention before that can happen, then you prevent situations like that BSA's script that was scanning for pirated software, and automatically sending out C&D letters. I think that as long as they make an example out of the first few that try to skirt the regulations, it should be pretty successful, wouldn't having a standard to develop sites against make it easier on the web developer? I know it's a lot easier for me when I build a site that's simply fully valid XHTML versus when I have to take into account IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. Some one else said it but it's worth repeating, this will add value to the domain, customers will know that if you're a .mobi they'll be able to access your site without any problems on their device.
</rant>

An idea before its time...

[Tofurkey]

I like it in principle, but this puts a burden on the author not only to build a standards-compatible site, but also to choose which standards will work for the least common denominator. Only when standards become a priority to mainstream browser developers will such enforcement be practical.

Other TLDs too please!

[ccbailey]

If .net, .org, and .com only forced their users into using W3C validated xhtml/css and standard ecmascript I'd be a happy man. If they then subsequently broke the kneecaps of anyone writing a non-conformant user agent maybe web design wouldn't be the laborious, frustrating process that it is today. Sigh.

It already exists

[Trolling4Columbine]

If your web site is W3C compliant (X)HTML/CSS, chances are that it will be compatible for viewing on mobile devices. Yet another advantage of adhering to standards.

Oh, of course... 'the market'...

[Traegorn]

Because we all know how well the market has adhered to the suggested rules on .com, .org, and .net...

And all the .tv addresses are clearly hosted in Tuvalu.

Self policing has failed.

Old Europe Strikes Again

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, we want to give Europe/UN control over DNS servers.

Could Be A Good Idea.

[dasil003]

First of all, 80% of posts so far complain about openness and beareaucracy, etc, etc. Well I can see right off the bat that no one has tried to seriously develop a mobile website. If you're still designing your HTML pages with tables because of compatibility issues with floats and absolute positioning, then you have no clue how bad standards support on mobile devices is. Even devices from the same manufacturer vary radically in screen size and feature support. Plus there's no dominant device, market share is split between hundreds of them.

Enforcing some standard on a domain name is a good thing because it will set a baseline for phone manufacturers, it doesn't make a lick of difference to web developers. You can always send a different version to their validation spider, and continue to serve up special versions for old phones if that's your mission. But given the impossibility of serious mobile development, I think cries for 'open markets' and 'content freedom' are coming from ignorance. Oh, you want the freedom to develop your site for a 10% market? Be my guest.

Oh yeah this could turn into a flame war

[SmallFurryCreature]

If today you wrote your ordinary webpage to the official standard you would have a page that would not display as you desire in any browser. NONE of the ones I know handle everything in css2 correctly.

That is not even to count such differences as how to interpret a file, by its extension, its mimetype or its data content.

It would have been nice if there had been an enforced standard, THIS is what HTML is and nothing else. It would have meant you could truly have been free to choose your own browser. It would also have meant that no browser would feel the need to pretend it is one of the better ones, yes IE I am talking to you.

Mobile phones are not like PC's. First off the domination of MS is totally absent in the phone world. Opera actually has a browser share that can be measured in whole digits in the mobile phone market.

It is also a lot harder to install another browser. Dual booting is not even to be thought of.

On the the other hand what about freedom? What of the freedom of a webbrowser maker to add new and intresting features.

All I can say is look at the wonderfull world of the PC internet. Can you imagine that a company involved with a "new" internet will want to avoid that? That perhaps they burnt with the failure of WAP want to avoid that whole chuncks of their new net are unavailble to users of platform X?

Some cry, let the market decide but the market does not decide. Or is /. just a poor loser when it claims MS uses its IE dominance unfairly to dictate how the net should be?

As a webbuilder I think that it would be kinda nice to be able to build a site just for once and not have to include any workarounds and bugfixes to support every single version of browser no matter how bugridden and insecure. Just once you know. WAP sites were bliss even with their horrible limitations. Just one way to do them and any syntax error caused the page to fail. Seperates the men from the boys.

Follow some basic rules!

[lilmouse]

Think of .mobi as .com.moderated. If you want to create a wacky, flash-based website that lots of people can't view anyway, and that certainly won't run on half the mobile-phones, well, then .com is for you! If you're going to create a .mobi site, then you're going to have to follow some rules. Within those rules, you can do anything you want.

"Free market" is why we have a monopoly that can flex its muscles and push alternate technologies out of the marketplace. "Free market" means you can't compete on an even basis, because the dominant player already has locked you out of the markets with supplier agreements. It also means that the W3C standards get ignored by the majority of websites out there, and there is no longer an even playing field - alternate browsers that conform to the standards better do not display as well.

Part of the problem is that mobile-users don't have sufficient information to use the best webpages. They won't vote based on which is the most effective; they'll vote on which is the most well advertised, hyped up, etc, or they'll end up forced to use a site because they've already paid for access to a different format (e.g., a banking website - they might choose their bank because it has free checking, but then be stuck with a sucky .mobi site).

Part of the problem is that chaotic innovation can give users plenty of choice in the short term, but in the long term, sites don't work clearly anymore, there are no standards, the standards that are there are proprietary and only known to one company, etc.

This is an attempt to make sure that one company (no names mentioned) can dictate the format of the webpages available for mobiles devices, and no company can dictate what mobile devices can access .mobi pages. I'm glad to see this, and will be curious to see how the pages look. Hopefully, we'll avoid another standards debacle, and hopefully, mobiles devices today will still be able to view pages 3 years from now.

--LWM

Re:Agreed. Let the viewers decide with their "hits

[BlogPope]

If a site isn't phone-broswer friendly, people will not return.

And the "Land Rush" of idiots who camp on every possibly useful domain name? Part of the reason the nets a mess now is because its so cheap and easy to register domains now.

So, what's a "web page"? Http port 80, html, ??

[karl.auerbach]

DNS does a whole lot more than provide paths to web pages. And web pages these days are a whole lot more than basic html.

So I suspect that policing .mobi would be really hard to do. But it's their top level domain and they get to succeed or fail on their own merits.

And I never understood why they didn't do this under a subdomain of an existing top level domain - there's absolutely no technical reason why .mobi is necessary to accompish what they want to do.

The really stinky part about this is that ICANN has permitted so few to have top level domains that none of the rest of us who might want to try to run (and profit from) a top level domain have the opportunity to do so.

regulations suck, but some domains would from it..

[dindi]

I do not want anyone to come to my site and tell me how to do things. If it does not work in a browser I am loosing sales/customers/reputation, whatever and it is my problem.

If I choose to lock out everyone with a browser I do not like I have the right to do it, as I have the right to throw anyone out of e.g. my diner based on clothing, language, behaviour and sadly enough in some places nationality or race/skin colour.

However I would govern public service sites : such as .gov, educational domains and even banks to stick to a standard that is always accessible to everyone, no matter if using lynx, mozilla, wget or some embedded browser on a phone, without flash animations, and in a way that my 98 year old granma could use it from her windows 3.0 box (huhh did win 3.0 have a TCPIP stack at all? :) )

By accessible, I mean usable. Most of these services are paid from YOUR TAX and so you should be able to access it from a wide range of browsers.

Let the market decide!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let the market decide and we'll get what we got in all the other media (TV, radio, music, etc.) where we let the market decide: endless rivers of putrid shit.

Mod me down, but you know I am right. Letting the market decide seems to faiol a bit when the larket is composed of low grade morons.

Forget the content...

[Iriel]

...I want to know how Opera's mobile browser will change. For desktop browsers, a good chunk of space is devoted to error correction (rendering in quirks mode, trying to figure out improper nesting...The list goes on, yet people still do it.)

But with a strict set of standards enforced, you don't need as much error correction, and I applaud that because cell phones are already limited on memory as is. I want to know if this will give phone web-browser makers like Opera more room to add features or just streamline the browser itself.

bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

TLD is a domain name controller.
HTTP is a transport protocol between two points.
HTML is the language sometimes used over HTTP.

WTF has the TLD to do with my HTML?
HTML is at the application layer and it's none of their business to even know about it. This is clearly an abuse of power and then EU will come asking for its own TLD.....

The only effect of enforcing this is to lock out www browsers that can't yet render the latest W3 standard.

mTLD can't even follow standards

[StonedRat]

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=https% 3A//www.mtldinfo.com/

fails to validate. Lets hope their .mobi site is a little better.

Missing the point: fundamental flaws of .mobi

[Bungopolis]

It is my view, as well as that of the W3C, that the .mobi TLD is a rather flawed concept to begin with. There is absolutely no need to cordon off a part of the web for a specific audience (users of small-screen mobile devices in this case). TLDs traditionally refer to the nature of the content provider, not the abilities of the user! If we would stick to accessibility standards there would be no need for domains such as .mobi. Imagine telling blind users that they should only access .blind domains and that those with really big monitors should access .large domains!

Tim Berners-Lee has written an excellent piece outlining his own gripes with this issue: http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TLD

Rotan Hanrahan has another: http://www.w3.org/2004/07/dotmobi_diwg.html

Re:Missing the point: fundamental flaws of .mobi

[StonedRat]

Exactly why CSS has the "handheld" media type. Press SHIFT+F11 in opera to emulate it. Naturally http://opera.com/ looks lovely without the need for a seperate site.

Re:Missing the point: fundamental flaws of .mobi

[DJCater]

Also, does anyone else find it strange having a TLD for mobile devices? I thought TLDs referred to country specific sites (ccTLDs) or to owner specific sites (.org, .gov, .net etc.) not to how the site is accessed?

Ah, that would be a yes then. E.g. http://www.threadwatch.org/node/865

Site should be "device agnostic". Indeed. Good websites can just use CSS 2(.1) media stylesheets to send different styles to mobile user agents. A good user agent (Opera, Minimo, etc.) will handle this properly, and there's no need for a TLD.

What a load of unnecessary effort.

So much for .mobi...

[WombatControl]

I'm not so sure the .mobi TLD had much of a chance to begin with, but this will certainly kill adoption. Mobile design is still in its infancy, and there's nothing close to a reasonable and unified standard for mobile page design. There's no real agreement on how content will display on a given device.

Ultimately, compliance with standards should be on a user agent level. If your device can't parse the code that a certain site is sending, it can either fall back to a "quirks mode" rendering scheme (as standard browsers do) or refuse to display the data at all. If you don't follow the standard, too bad, you get left out of the market.

By making .mobi domains contingent on certain standards, it will only insure that fewer people are going to be willing to create .mobi domains. What if the standard changes with the next generation of mobile devices? Who decides what the standard is? What if adopting the "standard" means leaving a significant fraction of users out in the cold? Why bother with a .mobi TLD when you can simply use device detection to provide the user agent with a proper version of the file. If you're already doing the right thing and developing sites with separate content and presentation layers, that should be a piece of cake.

With all the hassles inherent under those rules, why would anyone bother with a .mobi domain?

Tell them how...

[DJCater]

I hope they don't just enforce it and say "it's bad, feck off", but rather enrich and show the webmasters how to create valid content. Not only valid, but accessible and practicle for smaller devices (2 things which aren't touched upon enough in specs). For instance: "Mobile Web Best Practices" has some really good information.

what a JOKE

[tehwebguy]

maybe they should reconsider their TLD first! come on, .mobi ?!!?

first of all, it's 4 letters long, longer than most top levels (except country specific ones, i know).

second of all, it's not simple to type on a telephone keyboard. if someone is using a web enabled phone without a qwerty keyboard they have to type 6, 666 22 444 -- that is a pain in the ass, especially the "6," part. since it starts with MO you must do an M and then wait for the cursor to reappear on most phones

t9 input could make some of this easier, but not much (considering my nokia displays "noah" for the first match for 6624) .mobi domains just straight up won't take off. (don't forget it will take longer to take off in america, i'm sure, because most american don't consider their phone a mobile, but a cell)

bad, very bad

[wikinerd]

regulation sucks, please let the market decide.

Re:bad, very bad

[cranos]

First show me a free market

Re:Agreed. Let the viewers decide with their "hits

[Pollardito]

that's assuming that there's not some minimal file that will satisfy the standards, that the squatters can just copy onto their spot to hold it just like before

Could Be A Good Idea-attitude.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more than just the reality that most haven't developed a mobile site (a royal PITA). It's that the attitude that all rules are bad, and that openness is a panacea for whatever ails the world. And yet we wouldn't have the "open" internet if it wasn't for rules. Maybe the present crowd will grow up, and realize that rules have their place, and openness isn't always a blessing.

Silly

[photon317]

1) What gaurantee do we have that the .mobi admins will really track the important (especially emerging) standards correctly? If a new phone comes out that supports some special new wireless web standard that they haven't heard about yet, and I design my site to the new spec, will they drop my domain?

2) Who said that domain names have anything to do with the web, or at least standard uses of http? Perhaps I want to register a .mobi domain and offer up a service based on my own custom xml api over http, which gets hit by some java software I sell for cellphones. It won't comply with their known standards, but it is a mobile phone network service. Perhaps I'm offering something completely different, like ssh service over port 443 for proxy bypassers, etc..

3) Are they really going to take a zone xfer of all the hostnames within a client .mobi domain, and portscan them all to find services that should be machine-verified for standards compliance? If so, what ports do you check and which do you not? Is it ok to offer noncompliant web-services over port 888?

DNS is a lookup service for IP addresses in general. IP addresses are used for many things besides displaying standards-compliant content for standard browsers via http on some port or other. Some people seem to think that browsers are the only thing that generate IP traffic anymore.

Re:Silly

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

What gaurantee do we have that the .mobi admins will really track the important (especially emerging) standards correctly? If a new phone comes out that supports some special new wireless web standard that they haven't heard about yet, and I design my site to the new spec, will they drop my domain?,/i>

Presumably they will act in the best interest of adding value to their domain, something that means up to date standards, since that is what benefits them. As for some "special new standard" it will depend upon if it really is a standard, or just an attempt to embrace and extend.

Who said that domain names have anything to do with the web, or at least standard uses of http? Perhaps I want to register a .mobi domain and offer up a service based on my own custom xml api over http, which gets hit by some java software I sell for cellphones. It won't comply with their known standards, but it is a mobile phone network service. Perhaps I'm offering something completely different, like ssh service over port 443 for proxy bypassers, etc..

You may notice the content on the .edu domain is restricted to only educational institutions as decided by the TLD registrar. That is filtering based upon criteria that must be proved beforehand. Now they are enforcing standards on http, https, etc. on the .mobi domain so that it is all actually content mobile phones can see. Both of these things adds value for the end user. In one case I know the services are from an educational institution, in the other case I know it will work with any standards compliant mobile device. As for other services for that domain, neither of us has an informed opinion since no policies have been mentioned.

Are they really going to take a zone xfer of all the hostnames within a client .mobi domain, and portscan them all to find services that should be machine-verified for standards compliance? If so, what ports do you check and which do you not? Is it ok to offer noncompliant web-services over port 888?

I don't know and neither do you. I imagine they care about the standard web ports and will let you do what you want on the others, although it could be a violation of your license with them and eventually they may restrict mail, IM, etc. But then if you are going to offer noncompliant services on a non-standard port, you might as well go whole hog and offer them on an unexpected TLD too.

DNS is a lookup service for IP addresses in general. IP addresses are used for many things besides displaying standards-compliant content for standard browsers via http on some port or other. Some people seem to think that browsers are the only thing that generate IP traffic anymore.

Some people just don't understand that specific TLDs are for specific purposes. They think the internet is .com, and all the other TLDs are "extra" domains they have to register for the same purpose as .com to keep customers who mistype the URL from being confused. Domains are supposed to be for a purpose and if the purpose of .mobi is to offer standards compliant services to mobile devices, then the registrar has every right to police that domain to insure content that does not fit into that category is removed. Maybe you should petition for a ".nonstd" TLD that you can run your broken/propietary services on.

Stupid

[porneL]

The entire .mobi thing is stupid. In few years it will be completely useless:

• Decent mobile browsers can open most regular dotcom pages already[1]
• Macromedia is working on portable Flash player
• Mobile phones and browsers get more powerful every year

You can cheaply support mobile browsers today - just code more-or-less properly (nobody requires 100% valid XHTML). You can get prettier looks by writing stylesheet for handheld media. That's easy and done once.

OTOH .mobi suggests having separate website, with it's own design and tailored content. Hello? That doubles costs!

Does it offer something in return? Longer address? Unfamilar name? Moderation and restrictions? Yeah, certainly worth it...

----

1) Opera Browser for Mobile devices (and soon Gecko-based Minimo and Nokia's KHTML browser) handles table tagsoup, scripts, CSS, AJAX - everything that desktop version does (sans plugins). In already handles more CSS than desktop Internet Explorer 7 is said to support in Vista.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

OTOH .mobi suggests having separate website, with it's own design and tailored content. Hello? That doubles costs!

Don't worry, before this gets really popular, I'm sure someone is going to come up with a way of having multiple domains point to the same site. Let's call it "name based virtual hosting". I bet that's going to be invented before 1999.

If your site is allready compliant, just point the .mobi domain to it. If not, please fix it so that it's not restricted to Microsoft customers anymore.

Markets and cooperation

[jfengel]

When you put up a non-compliant .mobi site, you do more than just create a site people don't wish to visit. You also cast doubt on any other .mobi site.

The goal of .mobi is to create a whole set of sites that you can trust them to work on your mobile device, and people will comfortably go there rather than the .com equivalent, with which people are already reasonably comfortable. If .mobi has a meaning at all, it's only to ensure that comfort. Otherwise it's just a way for registrars to get more money out of you.

From an economics perspective, "free markets" do not necessarily mean "every man for himself". There are also aggregates of people which enforce rules on themselves in order to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. Corporations are one example; exclusive TLDs are another. Each .mobi site represents not just itself but a piece of the .mobi group, and they're all diminished by each non-compliant site.

Restrictions aren't your solution

[k0de]

In your case restrictions aren't the solution. It's obvious you are viewing pages that aren't intended for mobile devices, and that won't ever be governed by the standards proposed in TFA.

You'll get what you want when sites you frequent, such as slashdot, see the mobile community as a worthy audience.

You left off the other side of the equation.

[khasim]

For almost every successful product/company, there is somebody who said that in the development stage.

The same goes for every failed product/company.

And there are a LOT more failures than successes.

Ignorance about Internet,, DNS, etc.

[jotaeleemeese]

So somebody that is in charge of the .mobi domain (a DNS convention) is sintending to dictate how people develop stuff that could be referenced there...

Has it ocurred to these troglodites that what may happen is that people use IP addresses only (nowadays Google or any other search engine is pretty capable to find a site, DNS name or not) or put their websites in domains where the responsible people are not nuts?

I wish them all the failure they deserve on this idiotic enterprise....

Re:Agreed. Let the viewers decide with their "hits

[A.K.A_Magnet]

Part of the reason the nets a mess now is because its so cheap and easy to register domains now.

It's also why it's so successful, and why I and others can have my/our own domain name without it being a luxery. Though I understand some TLDs may be more expensive (e.g, .mobi) or restricted (e.g, .museum), it is important that having a domain under the main gTLDs (ie: .com, .net & .org) remain cheap.

I can ignore crap, but I would miss all the great things the web has provided thanks to the low cost of getting a domain. And even if it isn't required to have its domain name to have a website, free hosting these days has nothing to do with free hosting in the 90's (e.g, it's full of ads). And of course, the Web is only an application among many, I use my domain name for other purposes (e.g, having my Jabber server).

The french Minitel was a system very much Web-alike in the 80's, but it failed because it was not open and the cost of joining was way too high (it still exists but almost everything on the Minitel has been ported to the Web now). The Minitel failure isn't that it didn't work, it's that it didn't expand (to other countries or other usages). That it didn't evolve. That's the very opposite of the Web which is in constant evolution and expansion. So we all regret the good old times when the Web wasn't abused (in the original sense) but I prefer the Web as it is today (i.e. everything imaginable, crappy or not, is on the Web) than a Web where only privilegees can get their domain.

mobiletester

[geo.georgi]

I have written one such application.
Basically, you give URL and choose the devices you want to test.
It will make http request with the device user-agent and analyze the content, according to the features supported from the device.
Shameless plug here

I don't see how the validation will be enforced. Many content providers offer (slightly) different version of the content for different devices. (example big screen phones will have the content on one page, for smaller screens the content will be divided in more pages). The question is, what you will do when only the markup for some, but not all devices is broken?
You can check for some default content, but what is that, when you try to differentiate the pages, according to the user-agent of the phone?
Still, I think some enforcement will be not bad. During the testing of the site (January/February 2005), I could see Yahoo Germany having broken link on it's mobile home page for weeks!

Enforcement creates standards

[Enrico Pulatzo]

Well, this should be the first time an actual standard will be created for the web then.

I know what you're thinking, "the W3C! they make standards!" Well, they don't. They recommend, but don't actually create any standards at all. Realistically speaking, standards are what you find in the wild (especially in the case of the web). mTLD seems to be doing what nobody else ever had the cajones to do online: enforce a standard on people. I'm quite curious to see how well it goes over and how that translates over to other TLDs.

I'm especially curious to see if mTLD enforces proper usage of MIME types so XHTML might actually be served as an XML application.

Sounds fine to me

[zullnero]

I like the idea being able to hit a website from my handheld, knowing beforehand that it'll render decently. Instead of wasting my time/battery/in some cases data minutes waiting for some website to NOT render properly, just so I can know in the future that it doesn't work and not go back there. Plus, the mobile browsers that do so hopefully wouldn't have to spend so much overhead clipping down pages to make them render better.

Tunnel Vision

[Trails]

Blinders on, full steam ahead.

This is a BAD idea, and I'm a self-described standards "bible-thumper". Down here in the real world, standards are a good starting point and basis, but given browser bugs and compliance, it's not always possible to write standards compliant code that does what you want in all relevant browsers.

To do this properly, they should also enforce a standards compliant user agent only policy on the site users.

Individuals vs SpamCorp

[matt me]

You mistakenly describe the spamming of DNS as the work of idiots. It's not individuals as you suggest, the same trolls who post offense on newsgroups, write viruses etc. It's the work of SpamCorp, out to profit by corrupting the system to the extent that less than a single perfect of addresses are 'real'. No troll could commit this amount of damage, only a mighty organised power of evil.

Individuals are in fact the greatest contributors to the net, creating unique content, bringing innovative ideas and above all humanity to the internet. Not mindlessly buying every combination of marketing words from onlinepoker.com to cheapholidays.com only to create a shell of a site that has no real content but marketing links.. creating another clone of a real person's idea, knowing that with their control they will win in PageRank and steal their profit.

I don't know if you read about the milliondollarhomepage.com but that is a story that illustrates my point. Normally I'd scorn online advertising, but this is a clever happy story because the site was made by a real student from my university, and thanks to media attention he's alraedy paid off his student loan :) although I'm jealous. Now you can see that SpamCorp have bought pixelads.com buypixelads.com buypixels.com to steal visitors. Why do we use search engines even to get to my banks we bsite? Because it's no longer safe easy or sensible to guess the correct URL.

What about subdomains? other ports?

[StarkRG]

Since all the domain name does is resolve to a number what are they going to be policing? Would they be checking only mysite.mobi or would they be going further and doing www.mysite.mobi? what about donkeyballs.mysite.mobi? or ilick.donkeyballs.mysite.mobi? or even just mysite.mobi:8080?

Couldn't I just set up a basic page with just the word "hello" on whatever page they check and then use a different subdomain for some other bunch of pages?

Don't get me wrong, I think making sure that it's standards compliant is a damn good idea, as long as that's as far as they go with it (saying that you can't have porn is going too far, next thing you know they're going to say you can't have anything that critisizes the government), I just don't see how they're going to do it very well...

BTW: why didn't they use .mobl, .mbl or just write out the whole thing .mobile? I mean, as long as you're going with letters that aren't really easy to type in on a phone you might as well just go the full word... perhaps they should have gone with .dmw while not pronouncable it's really easy to type in on any phone (just go down the right side of the pad... by the same token they could have gone with .ajt .gjm or .ptw

Yay!

[MightyMartian]

This is great. Hopefully when we finally get the xxx TLD, we'll have regulation to assure that we get nothing but top quality porn. I personally would like to put my name forward as a regulator.

W3C Mobile Web Best Practices

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems that the Best Practices .mobi intends to follow are W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices.

This seems to be the first Working draft, and the W3C is looking for comments on those, to be sent to
public-bpwg@w3.org

From a quick read, it appears that these BPs should be applicable to any domain, not just .mobi. Overall, this seems like important work, and I'll certainly read the draft, and send comments - would encourage others to do the same

Re:Agreed. Let the viewers decide with their "hits

[Cecil]

Yes, and in the meantime I've spent $10 downloading their 1MB image-heavy piece of garbage webpage on my phone thinking it was actually a site usable on my phone because it had a '.mobi' domain.

Not only will I be not returning to that website, I will be cancelling my phone's data plan.

They want to prevent this from happening. I completely understand why.

Standards change

[Anonymous Coward]

Standards have a tendency to change. Whatever mTLD decides should be today's standard for .mobi domains will almost certainly not be the standard forever. Even if someone goes to some trouble to support the protocols and standards required by mTLD, at some point mTLD may decree their support for a new protocols and standards. Or they may add to the list of standards and protocols that .mobi domains must support.

Thus, owners of .mobi names face the prospect of dancing to the mTLD standards tune indefinitely. They can look forward to the monthly email from mTLD telling me to upgrade to this or that, or else face de-registration.

I would think this would rather diminish any rational person's interest in having a .mobi domain name, and investing in marketing it. This is especially so when the value of a .mobi name is unclear anyway, and when there are plenty of alternatives which don't come with strings attached.

These are name registries that we're talking about, folks. Their job is to keep track of who has registered which name, and to ensure that the same name is not registered by two different parties. It seems like they're getting a bit big for their britches.