DIAL is supported by the cell phone or browsers now?

[Robbie Chen]

Hi,

My name is Robbie, our company is planning to develop the wap page with
the DIAL, but I have tried the tags on the cell phone (Nokia 7360)
browser and the web browser, but it seems doesn't work, could you tell
me which cell phone category support the the DIAL?

Regards,
Robbie

[Max Froumentin]

Robbie Chen <rchen@...> writes:

> My name is Robbie, our company is planning to develop the wap page with
> the DIAL, but I have tried the tags on the cell phone (Nokia 7360)
> browser and the web browser, but it seems doesn't work, could you tell
> me which cell phone category support the the DIAL?

Hi Robbie,

I don't think the DIAL is supported in phones at the moment. The main
reason is that it is a very young specification. Only one Working
Draft has been published so far. Also, the DIAL depends on XHTML2,
which isn't finalised either.

Yet another reason why the main implementations might not be included
in phones is that DISelect (the selection module in DIAL) is expected
to run on the server, or on intermediaries, but not really on the
client. One goal of DISelect is to make sure not too much content is
sent to the client, since connections can be expensive and slow. So
it makes sense too have all the adaptation be performed as early as
possible so that only what's necessary is received by the device. And
ideally what's received is only an instance of the target language
(i.e. XHTML2) which the phone could display.

Hope this helps,

Max.

[Rotan Hanrahan]

Hello Robbie,

DIAL is not intended to be used at the presentation layer itself. It is
an "authoring language". The DIAL documents are transformed (adapted) by
a DIAL processor to produce markup that is suitable for the target
device. Thus no mobile device is required to support DIAL itself.
Instead, the DIAL processors would be required to generate whatever
markup the devices were using. A DIAL processor would be located on a
server (or cluster of servers for large deployments). A DIAL document
could, for example, be transformed to produce a XHTML-MP document, or a
XHTML 1.0 document, or WML, iMode etc if the transformer was suitably
powerful.

If you apply no transformation to a DIAL document, apart from executing
the embedded DISelect, you will produce a XHTML 2.0 document. This is
not supported by browser clients at the moment. For this reason,
adaptation of DIAL documents should be assumed. XHTML 2.0 is quite a
good language to use for adaptable authoring, though in theory you could
use any machine-readable document format that could represent content in
an abstract manner.

Commercial solutions based on the concepts contained within DIAL have
been on the market for some time, if you care to look at the offerings.
Trial versions may also be available. The basic concept is to
incorporate guidelines from the author into a source document to drive a
transformation process. Embedding this within XHTML is the approach
presented in DIAL. Some open source content adaptation solutions might
also solve your mobile needs using similar or alternative techniques,
unless you are looking for commercial-grade support.

Regards,
---Rotan Hanrahan. (MobileAware, Member DIWG, Chair DDWG)

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/dial/ 

-----Original Message-----
From: www-di-request@... [mailto:www-di-request@...] On Behalf Of
Robbie Chen
Sent: 27 September 2006 20:31
To: www-di@...
Subject: DIAL is supported by the cell phone or browsers now?


Hi,

My name is Robbie, our company is planning to develop the wap page with
the DIAL, but I have tried the tags on the cell phone (Nokia 7360)
browser and the web browser, but it seems doesn't work, could you tell
me which cell phone category support the the DIAL?

Regards,
Robbie