CircleID

Of course, I couldn't help but notice this post on Dev::Blog, particularly this part:

And that's my biggest problem with .mobi - today, most PC-based web sites are coded to a core set of browsers, and things like Netscape 4 compatibility doesn't come up much. If .mobi is going to be a trustmark, it implies that older phones will still work 5 years from now. While Michael mentioned that some countries have a refresh cycle of as little as 6 months per phone, the Canadian market is subsidized by the carriers, with a typical refresh of every 2 or 3 years. I'd hope that the state of mobile data improves at least a little in that time, but we may not be able to see it if everyone's still coding to the lowest common denominator, effectively turning mobile data into the next Minitel.

The core assumption here is that dotMobi will not address evolving standards or be backwards compatible in five years.

Drum roll please… dotMobi does address new evolving standards and will be backwards-compatible. The standards behind dotMobi have been created in partnership with the W3C—the organization who gave the world HTML and the web browser.

So when you want to know about what will happen to a dotMobi website, then you only have to look at what happened to the dotcom websites from five years ago. Back then, we had Netscape, Mosaic, and Internet Explorer using HTML 1.X and the world progressed to new browsers like Firefox, Opera, and newer versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer.

The exact same evolution will happen with dotMobi in our work with the W3C. The browsers will mature with the mobile phones. dotMobi decided to use an open approach with the W3C because the Internet has proven over and over that only open, standards-based approaches can reach massive adoption.

The dotMobi of today will work on the browser five years from now. It is not a function of the domain name, but a function of the standards behind the domain name that must be examined closely. dotMobi chose an open approach with the inventing organization of the web, W3C, who happen to know a little something about evolving standards and backwards compatibility.

Written by Neil Edwards, CEO of dotMobi.

Related topics: DNS, Domain Names, Domain Registries, Mobile, Top-Level Domains