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 What if the criteria that mTLD comes up with is outdated or improper?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