The Mess That Is The Mobile Web

I wanted to check an ebay auction on my mobile the other day. I typed in m.ebay.co.uk as the m subdomain seems to be the common mobile web shortcut (see m.google.co.uk and m.flickr.com). But that didn't work. Next I tried ebay.co.uk/mobile (I think I might have googled for that) which linked to pages.ebay.co.uk/mobile/web/ which in turn promised me that the address I was after was ebaymobile.co.uk. But that didn't work either! Eventually, I think through googling some more I found it at wap.ebay.co.uk. eBay isn't the first company to use the wap subdomain, see also wap.tfl.gov.uk. I think the most rediculous mobile subdomain I know of is nationalrail's pda.ojp.nationalrail.co.uk. Kai is against the .mobi TLD as he believes that it will fragment the web, but as all these subdomains suggest, we do need separate pages for devices with small screens, as good as CSS is, it cannot do it alone, and once you admit that we need different pages for mobiles wouldn't it be easier if we all knew that we could use the .mobi address? I really do prefer the m subdomain over all of this though, purely because it's fewer letters to type on a tiny keyboard. Incidentally wap.ebay.co.uk is pretty good and ebay.mobi forwards to ebay.com.

UPDATE: Another thing that annoys me is browser detection. If I go to a mobile site I do not want to be redirected to the desktop site just because the site in question doesn't know about the browser I am using.

UPDATE: I emailed ebay about their issue, and surprisingly they responded. In their email was this gem: "We do have carrier-specific mobile sites." WTF?