Web hosting Device Independence.

The Web is designed as a universal space. Its universality is its most important facet. I spend many hours giving talks just to emphasize this point. The success of the Web stems from its universality as do most of the architectural constraints.

The Web must operate independently of the hardware, software or network used to access it, of the perceived quality or appropriateness of the information on it, and of the culture, and language, and physical capabilities of those who access it [WTW]. Hardware and network independence in particular have been crucial to the growth of the Web. In the past, network independence has been assured largely by the Internet architecture. The Internet connects all devices without regard to the type or size or band of device, nor with regard to the wireless or wired or optical infrastructure used. This is its great strength. From its inception, the Web built upon this architecture and introduced device independence at the user interface level. By separating the information content from its presentation (as is possible by mixing HTML with CSS, XML with XSL and CSS, etc.) the Web allows the same information to be viewed from computers with all sorts of screen sizes, color depths, and so on. Many of the original Web terminals were character-oriented, and now visually impaired users use text-oriented interfaces to the same information.

For a time, many Web site designers did not see the necessity for such device independence, and indicated that their site was "best viewed using screen set to 800x600". Those Web sites now look terrible on a phone or, for that matter, on a much larger screen. By contrast, many Web sites which use style sheets appropriately can look very good on a very wide range of screen sizes.

It is true that to to optimize the use of any device, an awareness on the part of the server allows it to customize the content and the whole layout of a site. However, the domain name is perhaps the worst possible way of communicating information about the device. Devices vary in many ways, including:

* Network bandwidth at the time,
* Screen size and resolution,
* Intermittent or continuous connectivity,

and so on. While with the current technology, the phrase "Mobile" may equate roughly in many minds to "something like a cell phone", it is naive -- and pessimistic -- to imagine that this one style of device will be the combination that will endure for any length of time. Just as concepts such as the "Network PC" and the "Multimedia PC" which defined profiles of device capability were swept away in the onrush of technology, so will an attempt to divide devices, users and content into two groups. Small devices will have high bandwidth. Devices with large screens will sometimes have small bandwidth. Some "mobile" phones will be permanently mounted on kitchen walls. The range of digital assistants will continue to evolve.

There are good ways to deal with and derive the greatest benefit from the growing diversity of client devices. The adaptation may occur on the client side, the server side, or both. For example, the CC/PP specifications provide a framework for a client device to describe its capabilities in great detail to a server. This is based partly on the UAPROF (User Agent Profile) specifications developed by the mobile phone industry. Also, the HTTP specification has a content negotiation mechanism which allows a device to give a simple profile of its capabilities whenever it asks for some information. Even when a server serves the same static content to mobile and fixed systems, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allows specific style information to be applied by hand-held clients only, allowing quite different presentations to be displayed in the two cases. These systems, just a few of the technologies which already exist, leaving aside those which could be designed, are much more powerful than a top level domain name.

The various documents about the ".mobi" Top Level Domain talk about not only mobile devices but "mobile users" and "mobile businesses". There is an indication that the mobile technology providers feel that while one is mobile, or when one is catering to a mobile customer, one is special or different. This may in fact be motivated simply by attempts to increase the visibility of the mobile communications supplier's name. It may be connected with a hope by the communication providers to gain some control of over information flow to and from mobile users. This would be detrimental to the open markets enabled by the Internet.

If neither of these motivations are the cause, then perhaps there is an honest belief that being mobile will indeed be best when it is visible to end users. In other words, the mobile communications providers are expecting to declare failure. It is failure when a communications system, in providing connectivity, becomes foremost in the user's perceptions. A travel agent should be a travel business, not a "mobile business". In a reasonable world, the travel agent gets on with selling flights and not worrying about whether a customer is attached by a wire. In a reasonable world, a phone is a phone and the particular electromagnetics used to connect it to another phone are totally uninteresting compared to the fact that a person is connected to another person