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I will admit to paying little to no attention to .mobi, but apparently there are many more supporters than I thought.
Sell me on .mobi in this thread, but first read my views on it and let me know where I am wrong.
.mobi was approved by ICANN in July 2005. I don't know what length of time .mobi was in the planning stages prior to that, but it was certainly back when few developers were taking mobile content seriously because the trickle of traffic didn't yet warrant moving forward.
The most widely accepted concept was that we would eventually have to promote m.yoursite.com as a mobile friendly version. That is why .mobi was actually a really good idea at the time. Certainly it would be easier to brand yoursite.mobi rather than m.yoursite.com, yoursite.com/mobile or any other non-standard URL format. Plus, .mobi would say "This site works from your mobile device."
Then the incentive (mobile traffic) finally arrived to take a serious look at a mobile compliance. By this time the accepted process of serving a mobile compliant site was essentially the same for .mobi and .com, so the added step of detecting user agents from the .com and pointing to an alternative mobile stylesheet or doing a redirect to m.yoursite.com wasn't enough of a liability to force using .mobi.
I see absolutely no reason to use a .mobi here in 2009. Again, good idea when it came out given the limitations at the time, but ultimately premature and quickly trumped by other technologies.
That is my side. Now I'd like to hear the supporter's side to see if I'm missing something here.
Sell me on .mobi in this thread, but first read my views on it and let me know where I am wrong.
.mobi was approved by ICANN in July 2005. I don't know what length of time .mobi was in the planning stages prior to that, but it was certainly back when few developers were taking mobile content seriously because the trickle of traffic didn't yet warrant moving forward.
The most widely accepted concept was that we would eventually have to promote m.yoursite.com as a mobile friendly version. That is why .mobi was actually a really good idea at the time. Certainly it would be easier to brand yoursite.mobi rather than m.yoursite.com, yoursite.com/mobile or any other non-standard URL format. Plus, .mobi would say "This site works from your mobile device."
Then the incentive (mobile traffic) finally arrived to take a serious look at a mobile compliance. By this time the accepted process of serving a mobile compliant site was essentially the same for .mobi and .com, so the added step of detecting user agents from the .com and pointing to an alternative mobile stylesheet or doing a redirect to m.yoursite.com wasn't enough of a liability to force using .mobi.
I see absolutely no reason to use a .mobi here in 2009. Again, good idea when it came out given the limitations at the time, but ultimately premature and quickly trumped by other technologies.
That is my side. Now I'd like to hear the supporter's side to see if I'm missing something here.
