Working in this industry I have a pretty effective Buzzword Detector, so I was a little surprised to find that DIAL appeared to have slipped right by me. Last month (May 2006) the World Wide Web Consortium published a first public working draft of DIAL (Device Independent Authoring Language), which is aimed at making it easy to present content on a wide variety of mobile devices. The W3C describes DIAL as "a markup language for the filtering and presentation of Web page content available across different delivery contexts."

I can almost hear you all saying that this is not new news. And, you're right, tailoring web pages to mobile devices using CSS has been around for quite a while now, except that there has been no way to account for the myriad of capabilities of those devices, e.g. differing screen resolutions, colour, screen size etc. DIAL is the answer, of course, and the W3C has used its preexisting recommendations for XML (XHTML 2.0) and CSS in DIAL's makeup.

Basically, DIAL allows developers to stipulate which parts of a page are included in the download to the mobile device using Media Queries. As some of you may know, Media Queries can already be used to specify different style sheets, however, DIAL takes it a step further and lets developers prevent whole sections of a page from downloading according to device capabilities.

Where DIAL may make its mark the most is before transmission of a web page to a mobile device. Beccause if the DIAL page is processed by the server and the parts of the page that aren't going to be displayed never get sent to the device then bandwidth is minimized and download time is faster, making for happy users.

Its not all nirvana though as there is dissention in the developer ranks, with some claiming that this particular language may not become popular or a standard and that it may fall by the wayside to software Companies that have developed programs which already cater to wireless devices.

At a time when Mobile content is seen as a virtual cash cow to the wireless industry, DIAL's publication is timely, as never has the demand to use a handheld device which offers the same level of sophistication as a Desktop Computer been so high. Surfing the web in style on your mobile device is getting closer and closer.