.mobi Websites Now Available to Register

Jaruzel writes to mention a BBC article about the availability of .mobi addresses for registration. The new TLD is intended to give a home to websites specifically formatted for mobile devices. From the article: "MTLD is promising that websites with a registered dotmobi address will be optimized for mobile phones, guaranteeing users a consistent experience. It costs about $25 (£14) to register a dotmobi site for a minimum two-year period. Oliver said that while he agreed with the need to improve the mobile web experience, promises of a 'consistent experience' did not always equate with reality."

Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

A worthless TLD just for mobile phones! It's about time.

Too long

[mancontr]

If they're for mobile phones, wich usually don't have complete keyboard, doesn't it make sense to use a shorter TLD? A 4-letter one will be a pain to type for each site...

Re:Duuuhhhhh

[Rob T Firefly]

So they can make a metric pantload of money selling everyone's trademarked and otherwise in-demand names back to them again.

Re:Duuuhhhhh

[ElleyKitten]

Why not just use "mobi.ibm.com", for example - why do we need a TLD for this? It's not like there's going to be millions of .mobi sites.

Because ibm.mobi is shorter to type than mobi.ibm.com (mobiles don't have the best keyboards), and so that mobiles can default or have a shortcut key for .mobi so that people can get to sites that their phone can handle with even less typing.

Re:Too long

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, complete failure. M and O are both on the 6 key, so you need to pause before the O if you don't use T9. Com isn't better in that regard, but at least it's shorter, so even though it wasn't created for mobile applications, unlike mobi, it's actually the better choice.

The web is broken

[MasterC]

When a new TLD is created because of a style issue: the web is broken. This approach of splitting mobile content from "normal" content is the wrong way to do this. CSS has media types [w3.org] and a media type of "handheld" FOR EXACTLY THIS PURPOSE!

The only benefit to .mobi is to be cash cow for the registrar. That's it. A properly design site should take advantage of the already existing method for handling this very situation. The website should change to me, not the other way around.

Re:Duuuhhhhh

[Rob T Firefly]

Personally, I love my site readers, but I really don't feel the need to enrich registrars more than I already am just so they can push four fewer buttons to get to me. I'd like to think my content is interesting enough to be worth pushing those four buttons. (Disclaimer: it isn't.)

Besides, wasn't it supposed to be a part of the whole XHTML/CSS revolution that a weak handheld could easily extract and adapt bog-standard site content?

Re:Duuuhhhhh

[ameoba]

If they're concerned about making things easy for mobile devices, which usually have somewhat limited input facilities, then wouldn't they pick a 2 or 3 letter TLD instead of 4? If they were concerned about ease of typing this in, they wouldn't have put M & O next to eachother (look at your cellphone).

Re:The web is broken

[jfengel]

Is changing the CSS sufficient? I'd imagine that for handheld devices, you want to change more than just the formatting. You'd want to deliver fewer bits overall (because of limited bandwidth), and possibly less content per page (because of small screen sizes).

That's not just a formatting change; that's a radical restructuring of the way you'd want to design the web site. I don't think you can accomplish all that with CSS.

Longer URL

[rad_chad]

So, in order to use this TLD, which is designed for mobile devices with generally akward methods of input...you have to type a longer URL than normal. If this is supposed to be useful why not: "website.m". Google has it right with http://m.gmail.com/ [gmail.com]

How many people use it?

[DG]

My wife got me a Palm LifeDrive for our 10th wedding anniversary. Comes with 4Gb of native storage, and built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

With a wireless access point in the house, this had actually proven to be pretty useful - the web in the palm of your hand!

But the number of sites that provide any sort of mobile-device support is minescule. Slashdot itself renders in Blazer (the Palm browser) as a single 1 character wide column of text.

If Slashdot can't do it, do you expect the rest of the world to get it right?

At least with a .mobi domain, you know the page will render correctly.

How many people actually develop sites for the .mobi domain is an other kettle of fish entirely.

DG

Re:Duuuhhhhh

[MoOsEb0y]

If they were truly optimizing for mobiles, they would have done two things: 1. they would have composed the domain name entirely of letters that come up first on the keypad when you push a button (i.e. a,d,g,j,m,p,t,w). 2. It wouldn't be 4 letters long

Re:Duuuhhhhh

[cortana]

ibm.com is shorter than both.

Separation of style and content

[zoeblade]

This goes against the whole point of separating style and content - the exact same web page, using a handful of CSS files that are each tailored to suit a particular medium, should look equally good on a computer monitor, a TV set, a projector or a mobile phone. Hopefully as people use percentages and ems more and pixels less, we should see a trend towards this ideal.

Saying "this site is for mobile phones, that one is for desktop computers," completely ignores all of this, telling people to go to a site designed for just their medium.