a) whether to build a separate site, differentiate using style sheets or do something else

b) provides some explanatory text on the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices document which it draws on for inspiration

I’d like to add that there are some significant caveats to the technique of using display:none, suggested by Cindy Krum. In most cases the element is still loaded by the browser. So, for example, if you have a large image for desktop presentation and a small image for mobile presentation, the large image is still loaded by most mobile browsers, even though it is not be displayed. This clearly adds cost and delay to the user experience.

Finally, if your readers are interested in checking whether their sites are mobile ready, they should visit the dotMobi ready.mobi checker, which provides a preview of how the page may appear in mobile devices, analyzes page load costs and time, and points out ways in which the technical construction of the page deviates from best practices and suggests ways in which it could be improved for mobile devices.

I was surprised because, up until then, the ideas in her section seemed well thought out.

It’s rare to see companies that hinge their brand on a domain. Even the greatest Internet success stories like Amazon, Google and Yahoo aren’t tied to a domain. They realize a domain is a channel; to them, a .fr, or .co.uk or .jp matters as much as a .com. That’s what .mobi brings to branding: a distinct, easy-to-remember formula for finding the mobile content of a brand and a distinct channel, much the same as a country code offers.

The subdomain strategy that iCrossing is employing is what has brought mobile users addresses like http://wap.oa.yahoo.com and http://proxy.espn.go.com/wireless/espn/. With .mobi, users can easily guess — say — “cnnmoney.mobi” or “google.mobi” and know that they’ll get content that works on their phones.

Now, think about brands that did tie themselves to a domain. Here’s one: pets.com.

We’ve talked more about this in our own blog’s misconception series at http://dotmobi.typepad.com/dotmobi/misconceptions/index.html. Our contributor, Ronan Cremin, remarked, “Third level domains such as wap.domain.com and mobile.domain.com do not work well for the purpose identifying mobile content, nor do special URLs such as domain.com/mobile and domain.com/xhtml because there are no enforceable standards for doing this (DNS is inherently distributed — registrants can do whatever they want with third-level domains). A top-level domain, on the other hand, can do this, and help the user to identify (and trust) mobile friendly sites.”