.mobi Websites Now Available to Register 149
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! (Score:3, Insightful)
The laziest way to make money (Score:2, Funny)
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Duuuhhhhh (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Duuuhhhhh (Score:5, Insightful)
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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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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Apart from that, yeah, having "m" and "o" together isn't the best of ideas, and is "mob" really that harder to understand than "mobi" that it's worth the extra character? Couldn't they have used ".wap"? (Yes, it would make it appear that it's tied to a particular tech, but it'
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ibm.com is shorter to type than ibm.mobi
I have a script that converts letters to numbers (dollar word) at http://lazylightning.org/dollar [lazylightning.org] -- it works for regular browsers and mobile ones (WAP) so people can use it from the field when they are geocaching [geocaching.com].
It's fairly easy to do with a couple of simple lines in your HTML and your http.conf.
Re:Duuuhhhhh (Score:4, Insightful)
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And if there's a shortcut key (Score:2)
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Why not just use "mobi.ibm.com", for example - why do we need a TLD for this?
Exactly. www.dotmobi.org tells us at the bottom that "the official site is available at MTLD.MOBI" ... and when you go to mtld.mobi it takes you to ... pc.mtld.mobi ... I presume if you changed your user agent to something suitable it would take you to the subdomain for a pocketpc or palmos or whatever. Just like it should be done.
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Since the page is utterly devoid of useful content, all they've done they've convinced me that browing from a mobile phone is going to be an unpleasant experience.
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Clarifying my own post...
I just set the user agent to that used by my phone and the address stayed at mtld.mobi and presented a simple yellowy/turquoise screen aimed at mobile devices. So that's kind of an inverse world that's been created. Instead of google.com, ibm.com serving up 'normal' pages at those addresses and special pages at mobi.google.com, mobi.ibm.com, we get the opposite side of the coin where mtld.mobi is serving up 'normal' pages ... for mobiles ... and 'special' pages for the bigger mach
Re:Duuuhhhhh (Score:5, Funny)
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I think they want to save the two-letter TLDs for country codes. As for .m, could you imagine the total insane gold rush there would be on a one-letter TLD? Think of everyone with a name or word ending in "m" fighting it out for the right to throw buckets of money at the registrars. Come to think of it, I'm surprised they haven't tried it already.
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If you've ever tried surfing the web on a mobile, you would understand the hope this finally brings to that current mess.
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A week without access isn't a big deal, and it seems that most companies have embraced this attitude, and don't bother with the 17 people that are frustrated by the lack of a mobile version of their websites. Apparently, Opera does a pretty good job of rendering down real content, and there are also proxies that do much the
Why? (Score:2)
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Too long (Score:5, Insightful)
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If WAP was more thought through then this, it tells you something about how likely it is to be a success.
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how about net? or org? all those letters on different keys, so nice.
or, even better, how about
sure, a mobile domain is great, but how about making is usable on a mobile phone...
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Oh well (Score:1, Funny)
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Some top-level domains are properly policed. Try getting a .edu for your blog, for example (or a .ac.uk if you are rightpondian). I agree .com is in a sorry state though; it's become the web equivalent of USENET's alt.*, but with a less meaningful name.
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Looks like it worked to me.
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I wonder... (Score:1)
The .mobi site could do with updating.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The .mobi site could do with updating.... (Score:4, Informative)
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This is just record-industry hype. (Score:4, Funny)
The web is broken (Score:5, Insightful)
The only benefit to
Re:The web is broken (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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If your site absolutely has to look a particular way that you can't just render with a minimal set of tags... maybe you should rethink trying to make your site look that way.
Re:The web is broken (Score:4, Interesting)
Touche. It won't reduce the bandwidth but you can easily hide your content. Some sites look *radically* different with and without style. For example, if you have the web developer extension for Firefox (or something equivalent) then hit up mozilla.org [mozilla.org] and then disable the styles (if not then copy the HTML into a blank page and strip off the link tags). There's two approaches here: minimal HTML design and dress it up with CSS (which is what mozilla.org does) or layout your entire site in HTML (as is usually done) and fine-tune with CSS. As of this writing, mozilla.org is 2796 bytes (excluding style sheets but including the links to them) but you might be deceived of that number by looking at the page.
If I can't claim brokenness on improper use of style then I do so on the user agent not being wholly reliable. If it was then you could switch your output *at render time* instead of at the virtual host level of your web server.
My point was that there are definitely ways to solve this issue without resorting to a new TLD with $25/year fees. Otherwise we better start
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The other reason I've seen for
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It's a convenience of the device, and if enough device manufacturers make it policy, it becomes convention. Convention is usually more important than standard, but de facto conventions can become de jure standards with an RFP.
Beyond that, it's really not necessary for all phones to apply to the stan
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The template for my simple website [remote-control.net] then will remove left/right columns, show photo thumbnails in 1 column instead of 4 columns, etc. if IsPDA() returns true.
I forget to test with a PDA, so I make no guarantees as to whether or not it still works perfectly, but the idea does w
Is changing the CSS sufficient? Maybe. (Score:2)
If I were creating a stylesheet for mobile devices, I'd tell certain classes of images (the ones I knew would be large) not to render, (perhaps you could instruct it to use the ALT text instead,) use sm
How many people use it? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 rig
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Yes. Slashcode is a horrible mess of Perl that never created standards-compliant HTML. After a lot of refactoring, it now generates valid HTML 4.01 Strict [w3.org], but this took a lot of work by the developers. Getting it to work nicely on other devices is probably the next step.
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1.) http://slashdot.org/palm [slashdot.org]
2.) My phone renders slashdot-minus-CSS just fine. It's a T-Mobile Sidekick II. Without the CSS, the page is perfectly readable.
(to get an idea of what it looks like, in firefox, "View" - "Page Style" - No Style)
~X
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Netfront is also good, but caused stability problems for me.
Subdomains (Score:1)
Having said that, I would say a standard subdomain would be a more sensible way - and lower cost - way to achieve this. Multiple TLDs just confuse users: "Is it ubuntu.org or ubuntu.com..." hence the reason most companies just buy them all up.
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I agree the site should adapt to you. But if you honesly believe the same content can seamlessly be presented on completely different media only via the use of a different
mobile biz != web biz (Score:2)
I work for a company thats in technology, so we watch trends pretty closely. Mobile space isn't even on our map yet but we attend CTIA and look for opportunities very carefully. It would probably be irresponsible for us not to. People want mobile technology and at some point, at least for more casual things, laptops don't cu
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Not trying to be rude, but you're just now figuring this out? :)
The market "wants it" because the current market can't handle it. Suppose for a second that websites used CSS properly and could handle user-agents correctly: would the .mobi TLD be necessary?
On a completely side point: I can't imagine that an emerging market for
listed on any registrars (Score:1)
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ironically, pc.mtld.mobi looks like a very mobile-unfriendly site. let's hope it has a different display for a different user agent.
and according to Go Daddy: General Registrations begins on October 11, 2006 (7AM PT).
Sounds a bit lame... (Score:3, Funny)
goatse.mobi just doesn't roll off the tongue.
Got mine (Score:1, Redundant)
Why not just ".mob"? (Score:1)
".mbl" (Score:2)
long TLDs (Score:3, Interesting)
Makes it easy for program to classify them.
Already done! (Score:2, Informative)
Longer URL (Score:2, Insightful)
Is .mobi moby? (Score:1)
how long till we see (Score:1)
.mobi.le (Score:1)
I mean, come on, isn't it obvious?
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Who will enforce it? (Score:1)
Lets just be sensible and stick to subdomains as mentioned by an earlier poster, mobi.bbc.co.uk makes far more sense then bbc.mobi, but then of course, no-one makes tens of millions in the land-grab.
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Money...
Lets just be sensible and stick to subdomains as mentioned by an earlier poster, mobi.bbc.co.uk makes far more sense then bbc.mobi, but then of course, no-one makes tens of millions in the land-grab.
Self answered
Separation of style and content (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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The fact that they'll police all sites on there to ensure compliance is a fantastic idea, I reckon.
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The fact that they'll police all sites on there to ensure compliance is a fantastic idea, I reckon.
Yeah, and I'd also be all in favour of a database linking to sites (DMOZ style) that comply with HTML standards enough to work with pretty much any browser. Far too many sites don't work properly in text mode, or using speech synthesis, which is a real shame for anyone visually impaired. Hell, far too many sites don't work properly on an Apple Mac or anything else that's not Windows running Internet Explor
Compatibility with web browsers (Score:1)
I just tried http://nic.mobi/ [nic.mobi] on a regular browser and it loaded. Now if I try something like http://google.com/ [google.com] on my mobile I get a WML page.
So, is it going to be the norm for every site to give a different page depending on the type of device used to access it. If so, this TLD clearly brings nothing new.
I would much rather type a well known URL I use at home and hope it gives me page that works with my mobile instead. Not change the TLD to mobi and just *hope* it is owned by the same company.
Very useful! (Score:2)
Next step will be the ".car" for 4 wheels enthusiast services and ".c" for C language programmers.
In the end we'll have almost all dictionary (
bow down to the telcos (Score:1)
It matters only because we're afraid it might (Score:2)
I've plenty of com/net domains I use for my sites, and since I'm not quite that rich, I refuse to waste thousands of dollars on a nonsense preemptive strike.
Mobi will fail anyway.
The heading is wrong? (Score:1)
Opera mini (Score:2, Interesting)
.biz again (Score:1)
Incorrect .mobi Link (Score:1)
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The .mobi link Zonk provided is actually just a registar's cover page. The real (and much more web standards-based) .mobi web site is at http://pc.mtld.mobi/ [mtld.mobi] [mtld.mobi].
Actually the 'correct' site (see a post I made above) is http://mtld.mobi/ [mtld.mobi]. If you're using a PC it will take you to pc.mtld.mobi ... but if you should go straight to that page using a mobile it doesn't perform any checks and gives you a 150K JPG to digest. Navigating to mtld.mobi should provide the optimal page.
.mob/deep (Score:1)
"MOBI" stinks for phone number keypad entry (Score:2)
There was also the .geo TLD (Score:2)
Yoda Music critic URL: (Score:2)
Mob friendly? (Score:2)
Check http://pc.mtld.mobi/whois/index.php [mtld.mobi] , put wunderground.mobi to search box and see the result yourself. While on it, check slashdot.mobi , it is taken too.
Weather Underground is one of the oldest sites on web (they started with Telnet/Gopher!) and they have a dedicated mobile (WAP) version at
http://m.wunderground.com/ [wunderground.com]
So, a Russian guy can get that wunderground.mobi yes? What guarantees there won't be som
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