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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?
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 What if the criteria that mTLD comes up with is outdated or improper?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.
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.
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.
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
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