Slashdot Mirror
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?
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 What if the criteria that mTLD comes up with is outdated or improper?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?
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.
.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.
Can this be enforced for other domains? Sure. Will it? Unlikely. Since the intent of
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.
.mobi name loses its meaning and more importantly, value for sites that are actually developed for the original target market.
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
That would be my guess, anyway.
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.
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.
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.
.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.
With that said, it may make more sense to let
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.
I'm wrong and so are you.
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?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
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.
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.
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.
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.
My other car is a Popemobile
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.
.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.
.mobi is necessary to accompish what they want to do.
So I suspect that policing
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
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.
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
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.
;)), upload a XUL application on my server and then on my phone use my application as if it was local.
.mobi validating agent allow XUL applications? Who are they to decide what I put on my webserver?
;)) 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.
.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.
:)). 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..)
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
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
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
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
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