New Domain Is Proposed

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 10:18:50 -0500
From: Steven Champeon <schampeo () hesketh com>


For IP, if you like.

on Thu, Mar 11, 2004 at 07:24:10AM -0500, Dave Farber wrote:
> New Domain Is Proposed
>
> March 11, 2004
>  By CHRIS OAKES

<snip>

> The nine companies, which also include Hewlett-Packard, the
> Orange unit of France Télécom and Samsung Electronics,
> announced their application for a mobile-specific domain in
> London. The actual name for the address suffix has yet to
> be determined, but would indicate a wireless theme, like
> .mobile or .phone, the group said.

Why not .fon? Make it easy to type and internationally recognizable. I
dunno what kind of phones these folks have, but mine (a Kyocera
Smartphone/PDA) uses Palm's graffiti, and my last three previous to this
one used a torturous system of typing multiple numbers to get at the
alpha characters (need an 'o'? type 666).

> "If you went onto a .mobile site, that site would be
> specifically tailored for use by a mobile device," a
> Vodafone spokesman said, emphasizing that the .mobile name
> was only hypothetical. "The whole site would have been
> organized for speed of download, ease of use and
> simplicity."

Sadly, this is completely unnecessary. Anyone working on the Web today
should be able to build a site whose markup is sparse enough to provide
basic structure and some semantics, while the presentation (how the site
is rendered in the browser) should be separate and determined by the
browser, device or by the user of the device, not necessarily by the
designer. I wrote about this a year or so ago, for the online Web
design/development magazine Webmonkey:

 "Progressive Enhancement and the Future of Web Design"
 http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/03/21/index3a.html

Too bad the folks eager to fragment the online space into still more
device-specific fiefdoms don't know anything about the technology they
seem to expect would spring up to fill them as a result, or the
technology that is already able to do so.

Steve
--
hesketh.com/inc. v: +1(919)834-2552 f: +1(919)834-2554 w: http://hesketh.com
Book publishing is second only to furniture delivery in slowness. -b. schneier

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