2nd public draft for DIAL

The second public Working Draft for the Device Independence 
Authoring Language (DIAL). was published today, see:

     http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-dial-20070727/

DIAL v1 is a profile of XHTML, XForms and DISelect. Authoring Web 
page content in DIAL frees developers from the need to deal with the 
myriad variations across devices. That task is devolved to content 
adaptation software that transforms the content and associated 
resources to suit particular delivery contexts. In addition, DIAL 
enables higher level authoring tools through the ability to capture 
the author's intent more effectively than is possible when authoring 
directly in HTML.

Further work is planned on extending DIAL to include SVG, SMIL and 
XBL, leveraging W3C work on compound document formats. Native 
support for SVG and SMIL is increasingly common on mobile devices, 
and provides for resolution independent graphics and simple 
animation effects. With the demand for richer interaction with Web 
applications, XBL will provide DIAL with a device independent means 
to bind to rich Web controls. The process of content adaptation can 
then select the appropriate implementations of these controls to 
match the delivery context.

The UWA working group is also due to start work on a standard means 
to express policies for selecting the layout and behavior according 
to the delivery context. Our long term aim is to avoid the need for 
Web application authors to have to learn the intricacies of markup, 
style sheet and scripting languages, and the infuriating variations 
across browsers. This will reduce the development and maintenance 
costs compared with today's approaches, whilst improving the quality 
and the end-user experience on whatever device he or she is using.

  Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett

Received on Friday, 27 July 2007 15:37:06 UTC