[applejosh]

Originally Posted by Eugenia

my husband blogged about .mobi a few months ago, and I think he had a point when he wrote that typing "mobi" on a numeric keypad is a pain in the butt: (10 key-presses! ;-)

Thats' a good point. I never thought about that aspect, and apparently the powers that be didn't, either. (Maybe it's M$'s way of gently nudging non-Smartphone users to buy WM devices?)

[applejosh]

Originally Posted by Eugenia

my husband blogged about .mobi a few months ago, and I think he had a point when he wrote that typing "mobi" on a numeric keypad is a pain in the butt: (10 key-presses! ;-)

Thats' a good point. I never thought about that aspect, and apparently the powers that be didn't, either. (Maybe it's M$'s way of gently nudging non-Smartphone users to buy WM devices?)

[smilbandit]

I've been working on a site at wampad.com. Mobi kinda kills an idea I had in my head. I was going to set up a registery for number to url translation. Where you could go to the site via wampad by entering in the numbers. I was going to give away 5+ digit numbers and then sell the smaller numbers. Oh well not the only idea for the site, but it was the only one where I could make money without having to go the advertisement route.

Qr codes would have killed the idea too, but they seemed far away from being utilized in america.

[SteveHoward999]

Why not teach the ickle pet-lamb web developers what CSS is for?

[Eugenia]

I am sorry, but CSS only works in a handful of mobile browers only. And half of them don't "agree" to render CSS the same way. And if that's not all, only the new WM5 version of IE, Opera and the newer versions of Openwave's browser support the "media=handheld" directive in order to pick up the right version of the CSS code. In other words, only about 20% of all cellphones would pickup the mobile-CSS code. Even Netfront didn't support that on v3.1 or 3.2, can't remember which version.

The CSS way is indeed the best way to do mobile sites, IF, in a utopian world (that we don't live in), CSS was compatible on all browsers and if all mobile browsers could understand the media=handheld.

Until that day comes, around 2010 or so, the best bet is either WAP or cHTML (also known as i-mode, an HTML 3.2 subset). That's what we use at OSNews.com too and we achieve 99% compatibility with mobile, text mode and old browsers.

[SteveHoward999]

Originally Posted by Eugenia

I am sorry, but CSS only works in a handful of mobile browers only. And half of them don't "agree" to render CSS the same way.

You can use all sorts of methods to test what browser and platform is being used and present content accordingly. You can use different CSS stylesheets according to what you find if you like - or build your CSS so it fails to something that looks and works fine where it is not fully supported. CSS can easily be designed to fail in a friendly manner.

It's called separating content from design and is a basic concept that all programmers and web builders should be familiar with because it saves oodles of time and maintenance in the long run.

[Eugenia]

Here's the thing: I do exactly the same at osnews. We autodetect over 50 mobile/text browsers/platforms and we serve it a different layout. Automatically.

And I do this with just one version of cHTML (plus our WAP-only version of course, for even less capable phones).

With CSS, which is so unpredictable in terms of compatibility, you will need at least 10 different CSS layouts/code. And you will STILL only work correctly on only 40% of the mobile browsers, because the rest 60% doesn't support CSS at all.

And also don't forget: CSS takes DOUBLE THE CPU time to render than plain HTML does. And when you are dealing with phones running at 50 Mhz or even 33 Mhz, then you realize how IMPORTANT running on simple HTML is.

Please don't try to debunk this issue from the "web developer's point of view" cause I have actually DEVELOPED and STUDIED everything there is about mobile browsers. OSNews.com is among the 3-4 sites out there which do automatic detection without using WURFL or CSS.

Also, my husband is a mobile-browser architect at Openwave.com (they have 52% of the mobile phone browser market) and while their new versions of the browser support CSS, plain cHTML is still their preferred method of rendering web sites simply because of CPU and memory restrictions. While us, geeks, love to talk about PocketPCs with 128 MBs of memory and 400 Mhz CPUs, "real" people (more than a billion of them) still run on 128x128 phones at 33 Mhz and 600 KBs of RAM.

[Mark Kenepp]

Originally Posted by Eugenia

my husband blogged about .mobi a few months ago, and I think he had a point when he wrote that typing "mobi" on a numeric keypad is a pain in the butt: (10 key-presses! ;-)
http://jbq.livejournal.com/78522.html

If that was .wap, it would have been much-much better IMHO.

I second that that is a good point!

.mobi isn't even mobile friendly!

[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by Vincent M Ferrari

As a content provider / site owner, I have to wonder what's going to happen to those of us who own one of the other TLD's. I mean, imagine if you own CNN, and someone comes along and registers CNN.mobi and it's for some legitimate site of some kind... You're going to see a string of domain hijacking and cybersquatting on the lines of which you've never seen in your life.

Bing! That's going to be a HUGE problem - so here's how this is going to play out:

1) Many sites will try to get .mobi, but not all will. Some will get squatted on
2) Those that don't will likely still want to implement some sort of mobile device version of their site eventually (this is looking 5+ years down the road)
3) Those that didn't get .mobi aren't going to just give up and not support mobile devices, so they'll support mobile devices with their own code (like we do now)

About the ONLY way to avoid this would be to automatically give first crack at the .mobi to the owner of the .com...what about about the .net and .org users? No easy answers there.

Overall I think .mobi is a poor idea.

[Eugenia]

It gets even better. What if both MyDomain.org or .net and the MyDomain.com want the same .mobi URL?

[Paragon]

I think .mobi is a very bad idea. We have enough problems with the amount of sites that don't render well on mobile devices now. It is getting much better all the time, but I think .mobi just draws a line in the sand. There are still going to be lots of sites that aren't going to go to .mobi, and will not develop their sites for mobile devices. The answer to better web access is not creating a new domain for mobile access but to continue developing better mobile hardware and browser technology. .mobi will only slow that process down, I think.

Dave