Lets get rid of the technology!
Tuesday, 20. June 2006, 09:01:57
or, let's get rid of prefixes and suffixes that are not technology agnostic.
The .mobi top-level domain initiative which was initiated by Nokia, Vodafone and Microsoft, reports that more than 5000 domain names was registered within the first 2 days after launch. This is no surprise. Being late with registering a new domain name can turn very expensive.
But do we really need this new top-level domain name?
People like Russel Beattie has argued that we do need it. Today people refer to their "mobile friendly" version as for example wap.ebay.com, google.com/xhtml or even mobile.opera.com. These solutions are *really* bad because their not consistent. I believe that .mobi might help these companies clean this up.
My criticism however to .mobi is that it is not technology agnostic (like .com or .org or .dk). If we decide to add top level domains like this for every type of media, we might end up with many silly solutions like:
opera.mobi
opera.tv
opera.pda
opera.mp3 (music player, could easily be confused with a music format)
opera.ife (in-flight entertainment)
This is not a good solution to the problem. End users should not have to be aware of what type of device (or media) their on in order to find the right kind of content. People who for example wants to read news on CNN should simply go to CNN.com and find content for their device.
Luckily there are alternative solutions to domain names.
My personal favorite is to build web sites using CSS Media Types. This enables easy adaption of the content for different devices without expensive infrastructure.
To test out how this works in practise, simply click "View" - "Small Screen" on this page (using Opera off course). This will simply change the active CSS document, and make the page into a mobile friendly version.
Voila. Problem solved. And did I mention its free to use and supports plenty of other media like TV and projection (similar to Power Point)
The .mobi top-level domain initiative which was initiated by Nokia, Vodafone and Microsoft, reports that more than 5000 domain names was registered within the first 2 days after launch. This is no surprise. Being late with registering a new domain name can turn very expensive.
But do we really need this new top-level domain name?
People like Russel Beattie has argued that we do need it. Today people refer to their "mobile friendly" version as for example wap.ebay.com, google.com/xhtml or even mobile.opera.com. These solutions are *really* bad because their not consistent. I believe that .mobi might help these companies clean this up.
My criticism however to .mobi is that it is not technology agnostic (like .com or .org or .dk). If we decide to add top level domains like this for every type of media, we might end up with many silly solutions like:
opera.mobi
opera.tv
opera.pda
opera.mp3 (music player, could easily be confused with a music format)
opera.ife (in-flight entertainment)
This is not a good solution to the problem. End users should not have to be aware of what type of device (or media) their on in order to find the right kind of content. People who for example wants to read news on CNN should simply go to CNN.com and find content for their device.
Luckily there are alternative solutions to domain names.
My personal favorite is to build web sites using CSS Media Types. This enables easy adaption of the content for different devices without expensive infrastructure.
To test out how this works in practise, simply click "View" - "Small Screen" on this page (using Opera off course). This will simply change the active CSS document, and make the page into a mobile friendly version.
Voila. Problem solved. And did I mention its free to use and supports plenty of other media like TV and projection (similar to Power Point)
WIDGETIZE
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