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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.