1. Introduction

This document is designed to offer guidelines and advice to dotMobi registrants with domain naming decisions. Note that these are guidelines rather than rules; there is no requirement for registrants to follow these recommendations.

2. Guidelines

2.1 URIs for Country Specific Sites

Identify national variations of dotMobi sites by using the corresponding country code top level domain identifier (ccTLD) as the third level domain identifier.

2.1.1 What it means

Registrants sometimes wish to offer not only only a global entry point to their web site, but also a set of entry points that correspond to sites tailored to specific countries. For example, Example Inc. wishes to offer specific entry points to deliver a fine-tuned internet experience to its operating companies in Japan, the US, Germany and Switzerland, as well as a global corporate entry point. The use of country code domains is a simple to understand model to select a user experience serving a local market, hence this model should remain intact when using the .mobi domain to steer the user to the mobile experience entry point of a site.

Example Inc. would use example.mobi and www.example.mobi as global entry points, and offer jp.example.mobi, de.example.mobi us.example.mobi and ch.example.mobi to support each country organisations local web site. This structure preserves multiple requirements:

• It clearly points to where the mobile experience can be found
• It keeps still leveraging the well established brand
• It supports multiple countries, allowing full alignment with established traditional web sites

It is recommended that Web sites determine as many of the users preferences as possible using information supplied in the HTTP request headers, such as language preference, referrer, etc. However, user choice should override such determination. For example, if a user requests “example.mobi” and analysis of the HTTP headers leads to forwarding the request uk.example.mobi, then this differs from the user requesting ch.example.mobi; if the user made a conscious choice for the Swiss site, he does not want to end up elsewhere. The authoritative list of ccTLDs can be found at the IANA list of CCTLDs. Note that this list, while similar to the ISO 3166-1-alpha-2 code list is not exactly the same as that list.

2.2 Language Preference

Country code and language are not necessarily equivalent with regard to the user experience. Leverage all language preference information that is available.

2.2.1 What it Means

The use of a country-specific web site entry point does not necessarily indicate a user's language preference:

• us.example.mobi might wish to offer a choice between English and Spanish
• ch.example.mobi might wish to allow a choice between German, French, Italian and Romansh