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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?
you mean Exteded TLD, right?
gtkaml.org
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.
The filesystem is the package manager
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.
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.
There's mischief and malarkies but no queers or yids or darkies within this bastard's carnival, this vicious cabaret.
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.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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!
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.