Occasionally I talk about braindead decisions, or people and I guess this will be one of those posts. I just read something on wg about the new .mobi sTLD. I remember having read something about it at the W3C, stating that it was inconsistent with device independence principles. You may also want to read (actually, you should) new top level domains considered harmful. Not just because considered harmful articles are fun, this article written by no less than Tim Berners-Lee is really good as well. (It's about .mobi and .xxx as TLDs.) Anyway, .mobi has been approved.
Now that is a braindead decision.
I wonder who came up with that brilliant idea at Microsoft. Or can we blame some other company this time, like Nokia or Vodafone, both part of the Open Mobile Alliance. For everyone who is still shocked or just does not understand it. The plan is to differentiate in content based on a TLD. So for normal content you would go to annevankesteren.nl and for mobile content you would go to annevankesteren.mobi. Just stupid and I guess some braindead marketer made that decisions or at least someone who shouldn't have made that decision in the first place without learning about the principles of TLD and device independence.
And if the learned the principles and still didn't get that, they may e-mail me. They can probably mail lots of other people too who will happily explain it to them.
Now to the strange part, where HTML 3.2 comes in. As we all know HTML 3.2 was created as some strange move from the W3C to catch up with the HTML implementations. Unlike CSS 2.1, they did a bad job. I just read the W3C has a formal relationship with the Open Mobile Alliance.
And do me a favor, if you register a .mobi, just register it to make it redirect.
Of course it's braindead, from our point of view. But since when did Micro$oft care? It's all about the money, dude!
Now it is intresting will it actually work. Somehow I doubt so...
No.
Wouldn't that discourage people from using functionality in things like CSS that are aimed toward accessibility? Come on, let's not get sloppy.
Funny to think that after all of the hard work that has been put into web standards, somebody can just come with something stupid like this and try to mess it all up.
There are very few sites that must work on mobiles but shouldn't work on normal computers too. The idea to have something like this is totaly retarded. And who wants to have to register an extra domain? Like it has been said earlier, it's all about the money!
If you ask me, all of these "extra" domain extentions are just making things complicated. I agree, they are evil (extremely).
Braindead indeed. This is like going six years back in time, if it isn't more. :(
This is actually not very different from having http://www.example.com/ and http://wap.example.com/. But then again, that was only useful when WML was the only available markup language on the mobile platform; today we have XHTML, which degrades perfectly in conjunction with CSS.
So, yes; this is a braindead decision. But there are so many types of top level domains registered over the last few years that doesn't get used, that I hope the same will happen with .mobi.
Asbjørn, wasn't it possible to generate WML from XML? I guess you can always do some sort of sniffing.
Yes, this is indeed braindead, and I fear that this is just going to become yet another spam-infested black hole, like the .info TLD - SpamAssasin assigns a +0.5 score when a mail contains URIs in the .info TLD. They might just as well do that with .mobi right away.
Wasn't it possible to generate WML from XML? I guess you can always do some sort of sniffing.
WML is XML, so the logical question would be Can you generate WML from other XML languages?. I think you know the answer to that one :-)
Oh, and buy the way, WML is truly braindead.
The idea behind XHTML Basic 1.0 was to be more suitable for mobile devices. Having .mobi is nearly as ridiculous as that adult .xxx domain they tried several times before.
As others have stated it's mainly about the money the markup and technology used is what should count not top level domain.
Although it sucks, this actually puts a greater responsibility on us to get the word out there that .mobi is a stupid TLD and how everything could and should be accomplished with semantically and valid (X)HTML accompanied with some wonderful CSS.
The end result will hopefully be that people (other than those who will never get it anyway, like Microsoft and spammers) actually know and understand how braindead it is, and don't use it. This is just yet another thing we who want to do stuff The Right Way® have to deal with and try to counter-evidence to death. *Sigh*.
Great, soon we will have every possible english word and abbreviation as a TLD suffix. Can't wait to see sites like www.microsoft.roxx0rz...
The only good thing about it is that most of the IEvil browsers won't support these until another upgrade.
Couldn't they just register a common domain like .mobi.com and allow dynamic DNS redirection for it's subdomains like root-servers do for TLDs?
Sometimes I think about plugging out the cable ...
That is, the one that connects me with my modem, I'm not planning any suicide or so ;)
But well .... Maybe no one's going use it? .... Maybe .... Just maybe ....
Guess I'm dreaming, right?
An amusing side-note to this. Try typing "mobi" using your phone's keypad. It's a lot of keypresses: 6 (wait for cursor to advance) 666 22 444. If they really wanted a mobile-friendly TLD that you could type into your phone, they'd use something different. ".wap" would simply be 927!
The plan is to differentiate in content based on a TLD. So for normal content you would go to annevankesteren.nl and for mobile content you would go to annevankesteren.mobi.
Eh? I'd say mobi would be for mobile providers, and anything specifically aimed at mobile stuff. Just like .museum would be for musea, .aviary for airports & related companies, .edu for education related sites (and .tv for television stations and programs ;p)... That's nothing new right?
There's nothing wrong with that, I'd say. Ofcourse differentiating on content based on TLD is, indeed, a bad thing. WWW means World Wide Web, which means it's for browsers. The 'problem' is just that I don't think there's some standardized prefix like wap. for WAP content, e.d....
~Grauw
Laurens, as you could have read in the links, it isn't supposed to be used by mobile providers. It's supposed to be used for mobile content.
According to the Slashdot story on this subject the sponsors of .mobi are Nokia and T-Mobile
An amusing side-note to this. Try typing "mobi" using your phone's keypad. It's a lot of keypresses: 6 (wait for cursor to advance) 666 22 444. If they really wanted a mobile-friendly TLD that you could type into your phone, they'd use something different. ".wap" would simply be 927!
Well, that's what word detection was invented for (T9 in my Sony-Eriksson mobile phone works pretty well). It has a WAP 2.0 (XHTML) capable browser which is quite useful in combination with my 1mb GPRS thing and a project by a student which reads out the NS site and translates it into proper WAP (well, it can be useful).
Arve, I read something different:
.Mobi is sponsored by Microsoft Corp., Nokia Corp., and Vodafone Group Services Ltd., which hope to target the domain specifically at mobile content and service providers as well as mobile device manufacturers, vendors and individual companies.
I guess my dreams of http://example/ are definately gone then. IMO, anything more than that is just segregation. We don't really need .com, .org, we definately don't need www., and just introducing even more TLDs is surely even more bad news.
This is a bad day for the web.