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.mobi Websites Now Available to Register

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the looking-foward-to-.awesome dept.

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."

7 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. Finally! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  2. Too long by mancontr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

  3. Re:Duuuhhhhh by Rob+T+Firefly · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

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  4. The web is broken by MasterC · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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 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.

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    1. Re:The web is broken by jfengel · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  5. Re:Duuuhhhhh by ameoba · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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).

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  6. Re:Duuuhhhhh by cortana · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ibm.com is shorter than both.