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

What's the point?

[lpangelrob]

Why not just let the domain regulate itself?

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...

Re:What's the point?

[SatanicPuppy]

Yea I agree, though I wish, on some level, there was a way to enforce standards.

The reality of it is, when the TLDs start trying to enforce standards they're not going to limit themselves to XHTML or whatever, they're going to try and mandate within the existing standards, and it's going to become a nightmare of buerocracy and inefficiency.

In the end, it all comes down to the browsers anyway...Whatever looks best on your browser of choice is going to be "best designed" as far as you're concerned, and this is an unusually savvy crowd. I still get people calling me about Netscape 4.7 javascript errors.

Re:What's the point?

[Narcissus]

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.

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 .mobi name loses its meaning and more importantly, value for sites that are actually developed for the original target market.

That would be my guess, anyway.

Re:What's the point?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

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.

I think this is a pretty important concern. There's no point in creating a special purpose domain set if any corporation or any entrepeneur can jump in and defeats its purpose right away.

This seems to happen a lot when a niche development goes mainstream, the companies and people that take it mainstream don't understand it and make fundemental distortions that defeat the original intent. Sometimes it is good but usually it isn't.

Re:What's the point?

[Jugalator]

This isn't even bringing up the philisophical arguments of why this is a bad idea...

It's not about censorship of content or layouts, but about making sites work with phones.

If not, they can make a website in .mobi that:

1) is not even intended to work with a phone -- do we want that for a special domain like this?

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.

Re:What's the point?

[ezzzD55J]

1) is not even intended to work with a phone -- do we want that for a special domain like this?

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.

Re:What's the point?

[Bert64]

Because if a large number of people use phone X which renders it`s own proprietary markup that`s incompatible with any other phone, then sites will pop up that use it.. Leaving those of you using phone Y screwed. Then as a result, people will think that phone Y is crap, and phone X will become more popular even if it`s a massively inferior device.

Re:What's the point?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Why not just let the domain regulate itself? 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.

First, they are trying to add value to their domain. If users learn that sites on that domain always work with all their mobile devices they will prefer it, which will make sites there more attractive, which will lead to more value for the owners. Second, letting the free market decide works great if you have a free market. As it is, however, you have minor interference from a swarm of governments and one huge monopoly trying to embrace and control said market. MS would like nothing better than to control the mobile OS space, and thus the internet for mobile users. They have the cash to strategically break service for 20% of users in the interest of gaining long term control and profits. This is not in the best interests of the domain owners and will reduce the value of the domain. Basically, I see this as a shrewd move assuming they can pull it off and one that favors end users.

Re:What's the point?

[A.K.A_Magnet]

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.

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 ;)), upload a XUL application on my server and then on my phone use my application as if it was local.

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 .mobi validating agent allow XUL applications? Who are they to decide what I put on my webserver?

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 ;)) 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.

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 .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.

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 :)). 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..)

let the market decide!

[yagu]

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!

Re:let the market decide!

[KDR_11k]

Look at the normal internet. All those stupid IE-only pages that are incompatible because of ignorant people deciding everyone has IE. By allowing only standards compliant material you avoid browser-specific sites and prevent browser companies from fragmenting the market. Since the mobile browsers are still developing and cross-platform compatibility on mobiles is difficult it makes sense to enforce the standards and allow browser writers to implement only the standards without stupid failsafe code that's needed because some popular browser implemented it once and noone bothers to check those parts of the code. So therefore, if "this page does not render correctly in Opera" that's the fault of Opera, not because the webmaster decided that everyone uses "IE" (I know, on mobiles the distribution is different) and he can get away with wrong HTML that IE renders the way he likes it.

Re:let the market decide!

[Rich0]

We already know what it will look like if domain owners are given free reign - we might as well drop the registrar and just do a zone transfer from .com...

Anybody with a .com/net/whatever site will just register the corresponding .mobi domain and point it at their regular webserver. Viola, the mobile migration is over, and mobile users still won't be able to find sites to go to...

If you want to drive mobile sites you should not only restrict content to certain standards, but you should also revoke ownership of any domain that doesn't have bona-fide content in 6 months after registration. (No under-construction pages allowed.) So, if Ford wants to keep ford.mobi they actually have to make a mobile website. If they don't then it goes up for grabs and Chevy can register it and put whatever they want on it as long as it is mobile-standards-compliant.

Just a thought. It seems like all the new TLDs are just opportunities for registrars to make more money as all the .com owners register yet another pointer to the same IP. I'd be open to anything that would break that cycle...

Agreed. Let the viewers decide with their "hits".

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

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.

TLD?

[b100dian]

you mean Exteded TLD, right?

Re:TLD?

[m50d]

you mean Exteded TLD, right?

No he doesn't, not only is there no such word as "Exteded", but TLD stands for "Top Level Domain", which .mobi certainly is. Try again.

What about outdated/old technology?

[garcia]

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?

Re:What about outdated/old technology?

[KDR_11k]

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.

Re:What about outdated/old technology?

[TheRaven64]

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.

URL inspectors

[isa-kuruption]

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.

Can this be enforced for other domains? Sure. Will it? Unlikely. Since the intent of .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.

.m

[jpx7777]

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...

Kick ass.

[Audigy]

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.

Re:Kick ass.

[MightyYar]

That's silly - you might as well tell blind users to get bent as well. As a web user, not a developer, I want to remind web developers that what we want is content. Many developers seem to concentrate on fluff. Fluff is pretty and might hook me initially, but it won't keep me coming back. I think maybe a page that can't render plain text content on the screen of a phone is more fluff than it is substance.

I read slashdot just fine with "links" on the command line sometimes, so why can't the page be rendered on a phone with graphic capabilities? How hard is it to make the "sidebar" appear only at the top and bottom when a user has a mobile phone? You are fighting a losing battle if you are trying to make your page look the same on every computer or device.

Headline mod for -1 flamebait

[Anonymous Coward]

"....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.

No disadvantages

[jiushao]

One disadvantage I can think of is that it is none of their fucking business. They are not there to police the content.

Re:No disadvantages

[Xarius]

Then don't fucking use them. No one is making you. And they can do what they like with their domains. If they don't like how you're using it, they can tell you to fucking go away.

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.

New 404?

[stuckinarut]

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.

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.

The whole concept is flawed

[caudley]

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's gray, as usual

[k0de]

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.

With that said, it may make more sense to let .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.

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.

This is so misguided

[MatD]

This is so misguided. Viewing a web page in a mobile device will be drastically different from phone to phone to pda, to web ipod (just wait, it's coming). Web page developers are going to have to resort to large conditionals based on the device viewing the page, and invariably, it will require breaking 'standards' to get a page to view correctly in the latest and greatest mobile device.

Plus, it's just kinda lame to force arbitrary rules on people.

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.

The power of consistency

[G4from128k]

Assuming that a TLD chooses standards that users like, they might be much more successful than other TLDs. A regulated TLD could be both more trustworthy (assuming some policing for good business practices, antivirus, etc.) and more useful (assuming the use of a pleasing, consistent look and feel).

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?

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.

Enforce all the TLDs?

[Monoman]

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.

How about utilizing the country codes TLDs more effectively like some .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?

Will they block DNS for non-compliant sites?

[khasim]

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.

Re:Will they block DNS for non-compliant sites?

[FLEB]

If they do block non-compliant sites then I can see them having a lot of court battles on their hands.

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 .mobi goes live, and spell that out in detail to prospective buyers.

Oh, of course... 'the market'...

[Traegorn]

Because we all know how well the market has adhered to the suggested rules on .com, .org, and .net...

And all the .tv addresses are clearly hosted in Tuvalu.

Self policing has failed.

Could Be A Good Idea.

[dasil003]

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.

Oh yeah this could turn into a flame war

[SmallFurryCreature]

If today you wrote your ordinary webpage to the official standard you would have a page that would not display as you desire in any browser. NONE of the ones I know handle everything in css2 correctly.

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.

Follow some basic rules!

[lilmouse]

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.

"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 .mobi site).

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 .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.

--LWM

Re:Agreed. Let the viewers decide with their "hits

[BlogPope]

If a site isn't phone-broswer friendly, people will not return.

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.

So, what's a "web page"? Http port 80, html, ??

[karl.auerbach]

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.

So I suspect that policing .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.

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 .mobi is necessary to accompish what they want to do.

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.

Missing the point: fundamental flaws of .mobi

[Bungopolis]

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

what a JOKE

[tehwebguy]

maybe they should reconsider their TLD first! come on, .mobi ?!!?

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) .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)

Markets and cooperation

[jfengel]

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.

The goal of .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.

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 .mobi site represents not just itself but a piece of the .mobi group, and they're all diminished by each non-compliant site.

mobiletester

[geo.georgi]

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!

Re:Silly

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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.

Yay!

[MightyMartian]

This is great. Hopefully when we finally get the xxx TLD, we'll have regulation to assure that we get nothing but top quality porn. I personally would like to put my name forward as a regulator.

Re:Agreed. Let the viewers decide with their "hits

[Cecil]

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.