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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."

28 of 149 comments (clear)

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

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

  2. The laziest way to make money by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Need money? let's just create a new TLD!

  3. 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 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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    2. Re:Duuuhhhhh by Rob+T+Firefly · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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?

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

      Because .mob was already set aside for organized-crime-related domains.

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    5. Re:Duuuhhhhh by MoOsEb0y · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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

    6. 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.

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

      ibm.com is shorter than both.

    8. Re:Duuuhhhhh by Beryllium+Sphere(tm) · · Score: 2, Funny

      We need it so that Herman Melville can put his whaling epic up on dick.mobi, why else?

    9. Re:Duuuhhhhh by L33t+Windozer · · Score: 2, Funny

      I hereby proclaim: All questions "Why do we need" are from now on to be responded with "because".

  4. 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...

  5. 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....

    1. Re:The .mobi site could do with updating.... by Afecks · · Score: 3, Informative

      If you read on you will see that they are having a period of registration for trademark holders to secure their .mobi domains. General registration for everyone else will be open October 11th, 2006.

  6. This is just record-industry hype. by Peter+Trepan · · Score: 3, Funny

    They're rolling out this top-level domain to generate publicity for Mobi's new album.

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  7. 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.

    --
    :wq
    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.

    2. 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
  8. Sounds a bit lame... by grub · · Score: 3, Funny


    goatse.mobi just doesn't roll off the tongue.

    --
    Trolling is a art,
  9. 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.

  10. Already done! by Square+Snow+Man · · Score: 2, Informative

    Most companies already have a mobile friendly version of there website. For example: http://www.google.com/pda

  11. Longer URL by rad_chad · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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/

  12. How many people use it? by DG · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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

    --
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  13. Re:listed on any registrars by brunascle · · Score: 2, Informative

    thanks.

    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).

  14. 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.

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  15. Separation of style and content by zoeblade · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  16. 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)