The World Wide Web Consortium, W3C, has introduced the Device Independence Authoring Language (DIAL) to facilitate authoring for an ever-expanding range of mobile devices. Thousands of mobile devices with a wide range of capabilities are in use today, and people have come to expect the same quality of service and wealth of information available on the move that they find on the Web at their desktop computers. This diversity poses significant challenges to Web designers and mobile operators alike.
DIAL is a language profile based on existing W3C XML vocabularies and CSS modules. These provide standard mechanisms for representing Web page structure, presentation and form interaction. DIAL also uses the DISelect metadata vocabulary for overcoming authoring challenges inherent in authoring for multiple delivery contexts.
W3C has invited review and discussion with the community of this first public working draft. DIAL has been developed within W3C by the Device Independence Working Group, whose work serves as part of the technical foundation for W3C's Mobile Web Initiative (MWI), making the vision of one Web for all devices a reality.
W3C has also announced that Web Services Addressing 1.0 – consisting of the Core specification and the SOAP Binding – is now a W3C Recommendation. Web Services Addressing 1.0 provides a transport-neutral mechanism for addressing objects in Web-services applications built on top of uniform resource identifiers.
The new method is called an endpoint reference (EPR). These are designed to solve the issues posed by specific scenarios, such as dynamic generation and customization of service endpoint descriptions (e.g. created for session identification), referencing and description of specific service instances, and flexible and dynamic exchange of endpoint information in tightly coupled environments. In addition to their addressing function, EPRs can serve a role similar to that of a cookie for Web services interactions. Another special feature of EPRs is the metadata bag, which allows additional information to be included with the EPR.
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Compiled by Hannelore Hämmerle and Nicole Crémel