User blog comment:Ducksoup/The Future of Infoboxes on Wikia/@comment-5590118-20150825212321/@comment-2240397-20150826125412

Hi Shining-Armor. It was one of the first ideas we had - to tag things as being suitable for desktop and the others to work on mobile. However nobody knows what future will bring so this time w decided to go with universal solution. Smartphones became a thing just few years ago and became a hit, tablets the opposite, smart watches are not being positioned by good and apple as the new thing you have to have. In other words you never know what will be popuar next year.

Also by introducing separation of data from markup, we are opening the doors for new cool features for desktop, like: semantic search or GUI for infobox building and theming.