I am inclined to agree with those people out there who are just not convinced that mobile Internet is “there yet”. Who knows, maybe with the propper application of “reality” this can change?

The World Wide Web Consortium last week published a first public working draft of Device Independent Authoring Language, which is aimed at making it easy to present content on a wide variety of mobile devices.

While it’s already possible to tailor Web pages to mobile devices using CSS (Cascading Style Sheet), there’s no way of taking account of the differing capabilities of different handhelds, such as screen size, color or resolution. DIAL allows people to specify different layouts for various devices. The draft standard is part of the W3C’s Mobile Web Initiative, an effort to make the Web as accessible on the move as it is at people’s desks.

DIAL is based on existing World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendations such as XHTML and CSS, but lets people specify what parts of a document are included according to various criteria, using Media Queries, a previously published W3C recommendation. While Media Queries can already be used to specify different style sheets based on capabilities, DIAL takes the concept a stage further and lets people omit entire parts of a document according to device capabilities.

DIAL may be most useful when it’s used before transmission of a document to a mobile device to minimize bandwidth. By processing a DIAL document at the server or in a proxy, parts of the document that aren’t going to be displayed never get sent to the client….. Source: News.com

Tags: content, world wide web, w3c, consortium