Ajit Jaokar'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.
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 my two 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)
Bottom line... It's all about the context, baby.
