.mobi?

We used to have a single prefix for mobile-friendly websites. Remember WAP.yourdomain.com? That was great in my opinion. You had WAP and WWW living happily alongside eachother. In 2001.

Now, five years later, there is no Wireless Application Protocol-standard. Mobile browsers such as Opera Mini offers normal X/HTML rendering. Even the WWW-prefix is being phased out.

Today we have any number of methods of indicating mobile friendly sites. Some still use the good old WAP.yourdomain.com, even though the site itself is XHTML. Others use mobile.yourdomain.com, others again use yourdomain.com/mobile/.

And so I fully endorse a common standard. Everyone who uses the web regularly on the phone, knows how frustrating it is, having to try any number of different combinations of domains, pre- and suffixes to find even the homepage of a site.

So why am I not ecstatic about .mobi? Well, I don’t think that a top-level domain is the way to go for the common standard.

Haven’t we proven a long time ago that those doesn’t work? Dot-com domains are not simply used for commercial websites, dot-orgs are certainly not exclusive for organizations, dot-net is living in some sort of unfinished state, 21 years after it was introduced — and go you know anyone who uses dot-name?!

Then there is the fact that you have to pay extra to make your site mobile-friendly, and still comply to the standards. It’s not that I have anything against paying for domains — but it will certainly heighten the threshold for some, to design for the mobile web. And how does that help anyone?!

So people and small businesses who want to make their sites accessible for mobile phones, but not having to pay loads extra for it — will probably just stick with mobile.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com/mobile, and so we’re back to square one again.