You might be thinking what am I going on about. The way I see it though a mobile website is only good for the current crop of mobile phones out there. The current pace mobile phones are developing with technologies such as flash and java all built in, people are already clicking the button to view the desktop site on many of sites. For this reason, we as designers will have no need to accomodate for mobile sites in 5 years when all the current phones move on and we get the next gen of phones that can fully take everything a designer may throw at the device.
The fact is when the technology is developed so the web design structure have to Upgrade... and as we can see it's what's Happen... The Mobile Phones Started to use the Web Browsers So the HTML and CSS Upgrade and Passed to CSS3 and HTML5.. So i think it's not the IMO Mobile Websites will be dead but they will have and MUST Upgrade and Follow the New Technologies to SURVIVE
Having a separate website for mobile, aka handheld, shouldn't occur anymore at all, that is since the CSS media attribute has emerged. Being able to target diverse and multiple devices is one of the main purposes of CSS anyway. Speaking of which, the accessibility and all the W3 conventions and recommendations has been ignored by many of those "designers" for years, so it wouldn't surprise me if they completely forgot what building a website really was and is about in 5 years you mention.
I personally think the following points: Mobile Websites will Still Exist Mobile (old style) .mobi type websites will die down. The reasons for this are that not everyone has great vision so the panning and zooming isn't easy for everyone. I do think that web-dev's will begin to make the websites re sizable so they fit from a 600px width to a 1920px width. Fluid is the way to go with auto-re-sizing text.
Agree, websites will be fluid to accomodate various devices and resolutions, but will be developed with all the bells and whistless desktops get now.
What good is a desktop layout at the 2.3" to 4" display size of a phone that actually fits in someone's pocket? It's not like you're gonna hold a 7 to 10" tablet up to your head as a phone. There will always be small screen devices and desktop layouts are NOT meant for them -- that's what responsive layout is here to address and why the mobile-space isn't going anywhere. Claiming otherwise is just herpaderp. It's like the people who say I'm crazy for bitching about megabyte plus sized websites built from hundreds of files because "the web is only getting faster thanks to broadband" -- Say that to the people living in areas where the population density is too low for ANYONE in their right mind to outlay the cash needed for new infrastructure. Say that to the people living in places where data plans are going to bandwidth caps and charges for overages like Canada and Australia. Say that to the folks shelling out a couple hundred for a bandwidth capped phone connection. It's the same BS we've been hearing for FIFTEEN BLASTED YEARS! It's the equivalent of the dipshit college professors my parents and uncle had when I was growing up in the 70's, and the dipshit teachers I had growing up who claimed year after year after year there was only five years worth of oil left in the ground right after the 70's oil crisis. Hard to take them seriously ten years later when they say the same thing. ... and talking about mobile for websites? That's the same thing. Maybe in 30 to 150 years when we're all wearing AR glasses... until then? Not so much. THOUGH, if you meant .mobi or WAP, that idiotic BS never worked right in the first blasted place which is why smartphones took off. Few if any people bothered with it on both sides of the fence, effectively making that garbage all but stillborn except for a handful of fringe whack-jobs. Kind of like *nix until Linus came along.
It just never gets lit up, does it? The oil case is quite comparable with the web ignorance : As they already know how to renew the oil sources and how NOT to use oil as excessively in the fist place, they don't want to. Either out of their utter ignorance, or because they feel they can make a profit out of it. It's pretty much the same with websites - you get to chose which side you're on, but it doesn't mean that your choice matters.