.mobi Top Level Domain Proposed
 

http://online.wsj.com/public/article...html?mod=blogs

Creation of a new top level domain suffix, .mobi, is being proposed to create a mobile-friendly web.

Ever heard of putting a near fully functional browser on your portable device? Hahaha. >:)

here and now
 

not "proposed". It's been approved for a long time. imho, only makes sense for certain applications, such as travel sites and location based web services.

If I type in weather.mobi in my Treo's browser, I get one site that is already up and running.

My bad. That's what I get for skimming articles.

Thanks for the weather link, it's in my bookmarks now :-)

On a 770? I can understand a .mobi website for a Treo (to the extent that I can understanding trying to surf on a Treo), but is the weather.mobi really an improvement over weather.com on a 770? My 770 came with accuweather.com pre-installed which I presumed (but didn't check) was because it worked well in the 770.

Oh yes, definitely. Even on the 770 I always use the "mobile" version of sites when they're well done (Bloglines, Google, Slashdot, these forums...).

In the case of weather.com, the full site doesn't bring me any info I need that I don't also have on the .mobi site (ie the 72-hour forecast for my area). And that page loads fast, even through a BT+GPRS connection, carries no fluff and immediately displays useful information.

The equivalent page on the .com site takes much longer to load, has a clunky header that takes most of a screen height so you have to scroll to see some content, loads heavy ads and opens pop-unders. So for me there's no contest.

Do you find that .mobi sites are preferable to .wap sites?

Or are they in a Texas underwater chainsaw match with no TV time-limit?

The whole idea of the 770 is a "minimal" compromise web-browser (and a clever user.)

Let's not compare it to a phone (with 160x100) or those other boo-berries whose screens requires bi-focals...

I the real world, the resolution of the device should be recognized by the software. This is the only area where "phone" devices are ahead of the "standard" resolution PC-based web-browser...

Actually I don't think I've ever tried any. I was under the (maybe incorrect) impression that they were specifically tailored for low-res phone screens and tiny CPUs - thus a bit *too* much pared down presentation- and functionality-wise for the 770's abilities.(*)
The sites I mentioned in the previous post (except for the new .mobi weather site) are all in regular domains, they are variants of the main site adapted for mobile devices (more like PDAs than phones generally) and seem like good compromises to me.

(*) I sometimes surf through BT+GPRS with a user-agent modified to suit a filtering Imode proxy. Some sites (like Google) get too smart and redirect me to a special (WAP-like) version which is clearly too limited.