Opera CEO says .mobi is a waste of time
I almost forgot about the .mobi domains as I’ve always personally seen them as pointless so it’s good to see that Opera’s CEO agrees with that.
Opera is the leader in mobile phone based browsers and they’ve produced a small screen rendering mode which tries (successfully most of the time) to make ordinary web sites display well on the small screen. It’s also possible to use the media attribute on CSS to provide custom stylesheets for each different display mechanism.
The need for a separate .mobi domain has never really been needed. Back in the WML days most people just wrote a separate WAP site e.g. wap.domain.com, making use of the headers sent by the browser would have negated the need for a separate domain for mobile content. Now with browsers on mobile phones getting better all the time there’s less and less need of specific mobile content and even in the odd case where you’d want special mobile content then it’s easy to do without having a separate domain.
So hopefully .mobi will be a flop, it’s totally unnecessary, it’s just hoped that holders of .com domains will register the corresponding .mobi. If it somehow does take off what next? Will country TLD’s want their own mobile domains browserden.mo.uk just doesn’t sound right.