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

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.

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.

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: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.