The problem with .mobi domains
21st April 2006 by Liam McGee
There’s a new top level domain in town, going by the name of .mobi, and it’s ruffled some feathers in the accessibility community, and at the W3C.
The .mobi top-level domain has been proposed as an alternative to .com to specifically denote content designed for mobile phones. The problem is that this attacks the very root of the web, that of content that can be accessed by any device.
The Web is designed as a universal space. Its universality is its most important facet. I spend many hours giving talks just to emphasize this point. The success of the Web stems from its universality as do most of the architectural constraints. (Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Worldwide Web, www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TLD)
The main headache with developing sites for mobile platforms is the variation in the way they apply styles, often ignoring styles explicitly presented to them via the “handheld” property or erroneously implementing styles that they have been explicitly excluded from. This can make some developers just give up in disgust, but they are giving up far too soon. Contrary to many users’ expectations, it is perfectly possible to present robust, flexible content in a way that can be displayed on any screen size. Communis develop sites that work very elegantly on mobile phones and PDAs.
Hiving separate content off into a .mobi domain seems inefficient when one can simply write to your device-independent website once and forget about it, secure in the knowledge that your users will be able to get at your content, no matter how excitingly cutting-edge (or annoyingly clunky) their mobile browsing technology. Of course, they can only do this thanks to some robust device-independent design from developers like Communis.
In practice, however, a mobile-user’s context of use will be different to that of a desktop web user. Mobile users will usually be after immediate, specific, possibly location-dependent info, in tiny chunks. So providing a different ‘media channel’ for mobiles may not be such a terrible idea. The fact that most websites are deplorable when accessed with a mobile device does suggest a need for some sort of quality guarantee for users, and perhaps .mobi domains may be that quality guarantee. Time will tell whether purists or pragmatists will prevail.
The W3C has an interesting working draft on best practice for mobile content available at www.w3.org/TR/mobile-bp/. Based on this, Mobile Top Level Domain Limited (the registrar, as far as I can tell) makes a couple of additions for .mobi registrant hopefuls.