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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."

9 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. Duuuhhhhh by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
    1. Re:Duuuhhhhh by cmorriss · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yes, we do need this. Web sites have had years to create an obvious standard for the mobile version of web sites. Guess what? It never happened. This creates one. Now, it will be very easy for someone on a mobile phone to find the mobile version of there favorite site.

      If you've ever tried surfing the web on a mobile, you would understand the hope this finally brings to that current mess.

      --
      10 minutes working on a sig. What a waste.
    2. Re:Duuuhhhhh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      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?

      Yes, but unfortunately the world's most "popular" browser still hasn't joined that revolution, so it kind of never took off and people stuck with antiquated and inaccessible technologies like table-based layouts.

  2. The .mobi site could do with updating.... by REBloomfield · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "It is not yet possible to register .mobi domains. Dot Mobi domains will be registered through ICANN accredited registrars. Please check back to this page for updates on when and where to register .mobi domains" - right underneath the big register button....

  3. long TLDs by hey · · Score: 2, Interesting

    At least the useless TLD are four letters or more.
    Makes it easy for program to classify them.

  4. Re:The web is broken by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Yep. You shouldn't be using all those div tags anyway. And definitely not all those layout tables.
    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.

  5. Re:The web is broken by MasterC · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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.


    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 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 .print for printing pages and .jsfree for javascript-free pages. It's wholly the wrong approach and the fact that it's being done indicates it's broken.
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    :wq
  6. Re:Oh well by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I believe part of the reasoning behind .mobi is that domain owners can have their domain name revoked if they use it to host content that is not HTML/CSS compliant and won't degrade properly on small-screen devices.

    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.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  7. Opera mini by edxwelch · · Score: 2, Interesting

    In my experience so-called "special" web sites made for mobile phones work much worse than the normal ones and besides that Opera mini can display just about any site perfectly (the only difference from viewing on a PC is that you will have to do a lot more paging)