arstechnica.com — Web browsing on portable phones still has some way to go before it is as useful and convenient as browsing from a PC, but a new industry consortium wants to change all that. Their plan? Introduce another top level domain called ".mobi", which will feature content formatted for mobile devices.
May 23, 2006 View in Crawl 4
drock9999May 24, 2006
Is it really released? I tried a couple of top sites with .mobi, i.e. www.cnn.mobi and www.yahoo.mobi. Nothing.
gamekidMay 24, 2006
Absolutely.The very fact that there is a separate domain for these pages is frightening. As MrFusion said, CSS is already there for such cases. Now this will just make it harder for a standard rendering for developers to make ONE page that works on ALL browsers.The most compelling argument for Web standards (and W3C Recommendations) has just got shot and killed. This is seriously worse than the f**king FONT tag.
geothenesMay 24, 2006
Dup. No Digg.
joquarkyMay 24, 2006
Additionally, isn't this going to be moot in 5-10 years as mobile devices become more powerful, have higher resolutions, and run the full versions of the OSes that we run on desktop computers?Why do we need a TLD that will be pointless in a few years?
resplenceMay 24, 2006
I'm glad most of you have already noticed how idiotic and harmful this is. I'm sure most developers in the field think the same. Let's just hope (and maybe even work for) that it will becomes pointless due to lack of use.
h4ppydotcomMay 24, 2006
Now, I'm no wizened internet guru, but if a site owner *really* wants to separate the mobile content from the PC content. And they don't know how to use CSS (or, more reasonably, want to present different content to mobile phone/wap users) then surely the simplest solution would be to standardise a different server name for the mobile content instead of a new TLD?For example:wap.google.com for mobile contentandwww.google.com for web content......or is that too easy?
warsteiner21Aug 21, 2006
Lots of fair points made regarding the TLD not really being necessary, but that can be said for other TLDs which are now in everyday use. Necessary or not, .mobi is happening. With the industry support behind it, there is note doubt that .mobi will be the TLD of choice for the average consumer surfing on his mobile device, regardless of whether the same content could have been delivered without the .mobi address. Opportinities will arise for those ready to provide the content.