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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."

14 of 149 comments (clear)

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

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

  2. 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.

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

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

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

      ibm.com is shorter than both.

  3. 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...

  4. 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.

  5. 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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  6. 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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    :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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  7. Sounds a bit lame... by grub · · Score: 3, Funny


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

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