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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?
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...
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
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!
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.
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...
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.
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"....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.
One disadvantage I can think of is that it is none of their fucking business. They are not there to police the content.
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.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Plus, it's just kinda lame to force arbitrary rules on people.
Since when did operating systems become a religion?
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.
.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?
How about utilizing the country codes TLDs more effectively like some
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Because we all know how well the market has adhered to the suggested rules on .com, .org, and .net...
.tv addresses are clearly hosted in Tuvalu.
And all the
Self policing has failed.
TRHOnline - Staggering Towards Brilliance
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.
.mobi site).
.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.
"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
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
--LWM
If they do block non-compliant sites then I can see them having a lot of court battles on their hands.
.mobi goes live, and spell that out in detail to prospective buyers.
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
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
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.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
maybe they should reconsider their TLD first! come on, .mobi ?!!?
.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)
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)
-- lol pwned
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.
.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.
.mobi site represents not just itself but a piece of the .mobi group, and they're all diminished by each non-compliant site.
The goal of
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
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.
Random and weird software I've written.