iPhone Safari renders .mobi (dot mobi) domains differently. But exactly how?

Question

Safari on the iPhone (iOS 4.3) renders web pages from sites in the .mobi top level domain differently than sites under .com. Whereas Safari does a lot of work to make desktop-formatted web sites work reasonably well on the tiny screen, it seems it gives up that idea for .mobi sites and just renders them pixel for pixel like a desktop screen. Setting the viewport doesn't seem to have any effect.

I'm not complaining, just looking for accurate information and possible overrides. We had planned to develop a custom .mobi site using XHTML-MP but still haven't gotten to it and probably never will with the way smartphones are going, so for now we're simply serving the regular site on that domain. We realize that this will be unusable on the not-so-smart phones for which .mobi was intended, but it turns out to be unusable on the iPhone, too.

Answer 1

Safari on the iPad renders web pages the same way. You can find more info here http://www.davidroessli.com/logs/2010/04/safari_ignores_viewport_mobi_domains/

It's annoying and the only solution is to use ip address