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.Mobi resources
The Top Level Domain (TLD) .mobi was launched last year. Registration prices were originally quite high, probably due to the inevitable new TLD fever. Prices have now subsided to be comparable with typical fees.
Why should you care? Well, dotMobi couldn’t get away with managing .mobi unless they at least pretended to care, so they’ve put some effort into creating developer guidelines and tools to aid mobile web development.
I’ve reviewed some of this material below.
Test if your site’s mobile ready
ready.mobi allows you to test if your site’s mobile ready. It has developer tips, rates itself 5 out of 5, and attempts to render your pages as they’d appear on a phone.
Although the interface is slightly garish, it does provide some useful information. It warns about many technical topics that people commonly forget about, including: access keys, caching issues and MIME types.
It also calculates a data price for each global region. This usually varies hugely depending on network and price plan, but it’s still an excellent feature. Even if it only serves to encourage developers to use less structural images in their layouts, it’s very welcome.
The tests are based on W3C mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0, which is worth reading.
Developer resources
The .mobi developer resources are aimed at web developers who want to convert a site to a mobile-friendly site.
The site’s been up since last year, but there’s still only a few posts so far. One of the more useful articles is Comparison of XHTML Mobile Profile and XHTML Basic
Promote your site
The .mobi showcase allows you to submit your .mobi site for a bit of self-promotion.
.mobi Mobile Emulator
The .mobi mobile emulator is a Java program that allows you to preview sites as if they were running on a mobile phone. Unfortunately, it’s more of a promotion of the .mobi TKD than a real tool.
