Re: Thoughts on top-level domains, esp. .mobi

Robert,

thanks for this very informative post.

r_olson wrote:
> I have not looked at the .mobi proposal.  On the surface, though, it feels
> to me as if it has the same difficulties as the .kids TLDs - no way to
> enforce the semantics and no way to ensure that links out of the domain
> would be "appropriate" for the semantics of the TLD.

Before even attempting to enforce the semantics, the semantics 
themselves need to be at least vaguely stable.

What's "mobile content"? For many people today it's 160 characters SMS, 
or perhaps a terrifyingly ugly WAP page, but it's fast becoming an 
extremely multimedia thing, decreasingly different from what's available 
on desktops.

I don't see specifically mobile applications either. Messaging? I need 
that from my fridge when I'm cooking and $DEITY knows it's not mobile. 
Geolocation? I want it on my laptop and it doesn't fit in my pocket either.

Is the Mobile Web different? Well, at the rate at which things are 
going, it won't be long before mobile devices are farther along the Web 
standards adoption road than the antiquated tagsoup-and-gif rendering 
pieces of donkey turd that desktop vendors have grown used to insulting 
us with. But I have hope that the desktop world will have a fun time 
catching up a two or three years from now. So in fine, no difference: 
there is only one Web.

In addition to that, SLD licensees and users may get the terribly 
harmful idea that the mobile version of a website ought to be at 
foo.mobi and the desktop version at foo.com, while there are excellent 
technical means of making those two the same website.

So .mobi is meaningless, useless, and potentially harmful. Does anyone 
understand the original motivation?

--
Robin Berjon

Received on Thursday, 6 May 2004 13:35:48 UTC