No doubt other manufacturers of mobile devices will eventually offer similar capabilities.
Will that kill .mobi? If handheld mobile devices begin allowing access to standard web sites, will .mobi standards matter anymore?
I have a couple .mobi domains, but maybe there's no future for them.
The iphone still has a small screen, and all the same limitations of other cellphones - so a compliant .mobi should still have value to users.
How are yours doing so far?
The problem seems to be that everyone owns domains, but only about three people have set up sites ... that's what'll kill the medium - lack of critical mass before something else comes along. Which may be iphone, but I strongly doubt it.
One thing is for sure if people want to call or text me they have my mobile number and I sure as hell don't want to be accessing, reading and replying to hundreds of e-mails and deleting spam per day on any type of mobile.
The problem seems to be that everyone owns domains, but only about three people have set up sites
Lol...and they're all mine:-)
I have about 20 .mobi's using two specifically for testing purposes etc and I'm quite surprised that with only giving a couple of links from our core sites that people are accessing them and responding.
How do I know that?
I have constructed some pages with special offers only available on .mobi and people are reacting to those offers.
Incidentally for anyone considering constructing .mobi the site does not have to be in xhtml. Mine are in standard html which conform strictly to the .mobi standard and they work beautifully scoring a perfect 5/5 on the .mobi readiness site:
[ready.mobi...]
If you want to see what your site looks like they have an emulator here:
[emulator.mtld.mobi...]
And congratulations on having working, visited .mobi sites - even if it is currently a lonely existence ;)
Plus, folks can just use a sub-domain if they really want another version of their site (m.xyz.com), like Google does.
Plus the funny part, it is actually longer to type in than the .com ! =)
.mobi may be the first format to actually matter in a technical sense.
I've always been very 'sniffy' about the domain-selling racket that srrounds .mobi (just as i was about .biz and .info, and am about .eu). But if people are actually making the sites, not just buying the domains, it may matter big time.
I've always thought the .mobi was a waste.
Unfortunately it's one of those catch 22 situations whereby the last thing anyone needs is a competitor etc picking up one's domain name and since the cost is very little there's no point in not having it.
More and more sites are being designed "mobile" friendly in their current state
Yep, I can't disagree with that however my regular sites carry a lot of trade widget images which are not suitable for mobiles, text only is not a problem whatsoever, therefore I am experimenting with 100 x 150 thumbnails to give people an idea of the product available and then they can actually go to the .mobi site on their regular pc/mac and make a direct link to the appropriate 500 x 500 or 800 x 600 enlargement.
It's very early days yet and my feelings are that we'll use .mobi in a completely different way to our regular sites. One of the beauties that I can envisage, for my global trade, is that we can make trade offers for anyone, wherever they may be, to check out at any time without having to look at the core sites.
After all it took several years for SMS to go mainstream and that, if you remember, was originally included in the specification standard at the last moment purely as a business tool, they never, ever considered what would happen when kids got hold of it!
Maybe something similar may happen?
I'm just getting my feet wet in .mobi, but I've found that if you want Google to tag your pages with the little cell-phone icon in their mobile search results, the pages need to have a MIME-type application/xhtml+xml and have a mobile DTD on them.
It's not a big deal to change the pages from HTML to mobile XHTML at all, and many of the HTML validators will key off the doctype and do a creditable job of validating your XHTML code.
90% of the difference is just using the XHTML closing tags, like <title="blah" />
Plus you can use access keys so that visitors can just punch a number button to 'click' on a numbered link, and you can use <a href="tel:+1-555-555-1234"> phone-number links to allow direct dialing.
So IMO, the challenge isn't the XHTML, it's determining what will work on all of the popular mobile devices out there, so that your site doesn't need a dedicated server to generate all the possible versions of your mobile site using the features supported by all of the different mobile devices on the one hand, while avoiding falling back to the lowest-common-denominator approach on the other.
Just for one example, the .mobi readiness tester will flag a warning on your pages if you use tables for layout. But unfortunately, some of the most common devices can't handle floated <divs> properly, and all that leaves as an alternative is <table>s... :(
Jim
Just for one example, the .mobi readiness tester will flag a warning on your pages if you use tables for layout. But unfortunately, some of the most common devices can't handle floated <divs> properly, and all that leaves as an alternative is <table>s...
Just like .com and some pc browsers ;)
you can surf the web--the real web, not a made-for-mobile web
Yes, you can.
Yes, you can download and properly-render a bloated page meant for a desktop browser, and then scroll around on it.
But is it desirable?
When you are using a cell phone, you are typically in a hurry and looking for specific information. Doesn't it make sense to present it in the most optimum fashion? If you did so, wouldn't that get your site preferential treatment by iPhone (or other cell phone) users?
Sure, it's fun fiddling with the zoom and scroll for a while. Once the fun is over, I think people will prefer sites that just give them what they want, already formatted for the confines of their small phone screen.
BTW, I've seen some ads now in the non-tech for .mobi sites. I think one of the big brokerages is pushing their .mobi site. Wish I could remember which one, but I think their .mobi was featured in a full-page ad in The Economist.
