On the face of it, having a top level domain for mobile web sites seems like “a jolly good idea.” The
.mobi extension will allow users to know that when they visit a site it will be viewable on their mobile device. Pardon me for being the dissenting voice, but this is a supremely bad idea for the Internet.
Last week (May 22nd) industry members started to register the domains they wanted, and they’ll be followed by trademark holders on June 12th and the general public in late August.
The basic principle of the Internet is that it is platform agnostic. Something that runs in a browser on one computer should run on another. Device independence is always the goal and web designers have always had multiple browsers open checking their work as they went along.
And mobile devices have long sought to be able to take a ‘full’ web page and render it on the mobile device either in a nicely ‘squished’ way so all the information is present (see Opera Mini, Access NetFront’s display technology, and the proxy rendering from Reqwireless WebViewer to name three), or to work in such a way that the page is displayed as close to a desktop computer as possible (e.g. the Nokia S60 v3 Webcore-based browser). AAS Feature: How Useful is .mobi for the Mobile Web Community?