New .mobi domain name for mobile devices

I've read about this before and now it is popped up again. It's about having a separate domain for mobile devices to access the web. The idea behind this is that many mobile devices (cell phones and handhelds) have the capability to access the Internet, but many do not because the web sites on the Internet are not designed for the small form factor and bandwidth limitation of these devices. Having a .mobi extension would differentiate these devices for use with mobile devices compared to desktops, laptops and tablet computers in hopes that a pleasant browsing experience will be experienced by the mobile user. However, the problem with .mobi that I see is that, can this be used for all mobile devices. Sure, it may work fine with cell phones, but maybe other rich multimedia devices like Pocket PCs and Palm handhelds want to have richer and interactive browsing.

How many of you use the Internet on your cell phone or handheld? I bet not many of you. First, it's slow, and second it costs you money for each KB you download. Especially, you don't want to use it for media rich web sites (ie. lots of graphics because those take lots of time and network delay to download on a puny screen like a cell phone). But people that do create web sites, don't really create ones for mobile devices, because it creates extra work on part of the web programmers.

Enter web content adaptation and transcoding. The idea behind this is to have one web site and then have some transcoder or adaptation module that will take the capabilities of the mobile device (represented as a device profile) and tailor the web pages towards that mobile device. Then if a new device comes in, all that is required is to create a new device profile, load it up in the system (as an XSL stylesheet for example), and then specify the rules to do the content adaptation. But even this method also has its own problems. You don't see very much adaptation of web sites, only in the research stage but not deployed.

So, will .mobi really take off? This means then that web browsers on mobile phones and handhelds will need to adapt to the .mobi extensions. If you know the URL of a particular web site, you will have to intuitively add the .mobi instead of .com. So, it will also cause a social shift since we're so always used to .com. This kind of also reminds me of WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) and it's answer as HTML is to desktops as WML is to mobile devices. But WAP really hasn't taken off, so will .mobi? How will the mobile world embrace .mobi?