Ajit’s got a great blog, but I never seem to get my comments to his posts approved (whole articles, no problem though!)
In particular, I take small issue with this one. The insinuation is not veiled enough for me to resist responding to (and hence the usual disclosure about my current role, and a cross-post).
I have to say that relaxing on my sofa using Opera on a Wii is a pretty similar experience to relaxing on my sofa using IE7 on a media PC. So yup: no point in having a .wii top level domain (or .console, or .couch or whatever).
But walking down a street in a strange city in the rain, looking for somewhere you can can get a taxi home safely? Sounds like a totally different context to me. One that .mobi serves well (for example in the form of http://cabbies.mobi/)
Yes, that’s right. Top-level extensions are about context, not the way markup is rendered. (The latter is something that browser manufacturers rightly obsess about).
So here are two interesting thought experiments I always keep in mind…
a) You’re walking down a street. You (somehow) have a full-blown version of Firefox on your mobile phone. You need to access some pertinent information urgently on it, and know the relevant publisher runs both a .mobi and a .com site. Which would you enter into your phone’s address bar?
b) Opera develops a client-side language translator for their browser. It can turn English web sites into French. You’re in France. Do you access ebay.fr or ebay.co.uk?
Hopefully the former in both cases: .fr is about the French context, not French markup. And .mobi is about the mobile context, not mobile markup.
(Although dotMobi still has a role to play with the markup too, because not every phone is yet blessed with Mr Jon von Tetzchner’s rendering magic)
It’s all about the context, baby.
And, by the way, I don’t recall anyone ever claiming that ebay.fr broke the ‘one web’… 🙂