do u dotmobi?

Are you surfing the web from a mobile device? Wish you could just guess at the URL? Hmmmmm….I wonder if it is www.foo.com/mobile/ or perhaps www.foo.com/pda/ maybe I’ll try mobile.foo.com/ or even m.foo.com/. Damn it sure is hard to guess mobile URLs.

Worse…while trying to guess the mobile URL…how many precious bytes of bandwidth do you chew up downloading pages that were designed for dual 30″ cinema display? Ouch!

I wish they would just create a TLD for mobile so I could easily guess the mobile url for a site and have confidence that the pages I’m downloading were designed with mobile devices in mind.

(Poof – .mobi wish already granted May 22, 2006)

So why am I sharing this with you today? Because our utexas.mobi site has now been live since the summer of 2006. Come take a look around.

Do you have your dotmobi on?

8 comments

  2. Sorry Glenda, I disagree about alternate domain sites for mobile use for that very reason (directory guessing).
    Instead, I encourage broader support for type=”mobile” stylesheets used in existing websites, so that the same domain and content can be used across multiple media formats. Just like how print stylesheets work. See, imagine if we had to hit a print.foo.com if we wanted to have a print-friendly version of a website. Granted, that’s a silly example, but I think it makes my point.

  3. A standardista like you shouldn’t be directing people to come up with alternate versions of their sites for mobile devices when it’s so easy to just do like Anton says and set up a mobile stylesheet. I did that with There Is No Cat and it works like a charm. One version, no synchronization problems, and it just works with every mobile device I was able to test with. Details on how I did it in my posts Let’s Get Small and Apres moi, le deluge.

  4. I do indeed like mobile stylesheets…but as a frequent mobile surfer, I truly adore web pages that have been designed just for my mobile browsing. Yes…a mobile stylesheet can make a web page tolerable on a handheld…but I think we are fooling ourselves if we think that “one size fits all”.

    So…can’t I have both? A mobile stylesheet and a .mobi?

  5. Two things, most of the handy mobiles(not smart-phones) have a limit of KBs to download from webpages, so, switching stylesheets wouldn’t be that optimizing. Even though semantic markup would be sufficient it depends on content length and size. How many letters are you keen to punc on ur mobile until you get to a webpage? That’s the catch ;)

  6. Did you consider simply redirecting mobile device traffic to a customized page instead of a new domain? It seems to be the norm on some sites and I sorta like that. Flickr does it for example. Figuring out what really needs to be on that alternate site is a pain though… and ‘handheld’ CSS just doesn’t do it. I like that the utexas.mobi site is dead simple, mobile devices = web like its 1994 ;)

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