Citrus Skies

.Mobi Muddles

26 September 2006

As I read through a BBC News article reporting that the new .mobi top level domain is now open for public registration, I have to admit that I didn’t feel any growing excitement about the “biggest shake-up in years” for the mobile web.

Being a mobile web user, I’d love to see more sites with pages properly formatted for smaller screens and this is exactly what the MTLD organisation is promising. They claim that they won’t just have a set of standards that people should follow, but instead will actively enforce these standards to ensure that all .mobi sites come up to scratch.

However, the problem that I see is that companies wishing to jump on the .mobi bandwagon will create entirely new sites specifically for mobile web use, leaving their existing sites as cumbersome and unyielding as ever to those with different devices and requirements, such as screen readers for the visually impaired.

One of the major benefits of the existing Web Standards (note: not “fixed” web standards) comes through the separation of the content from the presentation. This allows the content to be created once in semantic markup language, so that it will make sense even without any presentation information. Then a presentation layer can be delivered to the browsing device to suit its capabilities, whether it be a full-scale web browser, a screen reader, mobile phone or PDA. The .mobi movement, it would appear, is trying to pull us in completely the opposite direction, with separate sites for separate types of devices.

It turns out that I’m not the only one with such concerns. In fact, I’m in quite good company, with none other than Tim Berners-Lee, credited as the inventor of the web, expressing his concerns in an earlier report.

“I wrote publicly [that] I thought the .mobi domain was a bad idea. I still do.”

“What’s very important from my point of view and from the World Wide Web consortium’s point of view is that there is just one web.”

I’m afraid from my point of view the .mobi movement is a great idea badly executed, but with the weight of many large telecoms and software companies behind it, it certainly isn’t going to disappear in a hurry.

Article Tags: .mobi, dotmobi, mobile web, wap, web standards, mobile