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 What if the criteria that mTLD comes up with is outdated or improper?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