In 1999 I created a semantic markup language that could be dynamically transcoded into output targeted for the requesting device.
I’d been using XML since 1995, I just didn’t know it. I was lucky enough to be exposed to SGML and developing my own markup engines in the late 80’s for demo-scene magazines and professional in the early 90’s so I had a kind of a head start.
It was initially used for set-top box content transcoding. The language could be entirely or partially executed on the server. Partial execution involved some translation into JavaScript on some browsers or a custom microbrowser on a set-top box or device.
It was also of course applicable to mobile phone development and with WAP on the way it was very little effort to adapt it.
It could take an XML feed from a server or transcode existing HTML into XML feeds and then break the content up into chucks suitable for a mobile device. When we tried to sell this award winning software, nobody was interested as we were just in time for the collapse of the tech bubble. I’ve been told that if we had done this a year earlier it would have sold for tens of millions – but those are the breaks.
So just in time for the credit crunch I’ve recently launched my little image transcoding service. http://qr.tl and have built into it the option to resize an image to the ideal for the mobile device doing the requesting using a semantic hint. eg. wallpaper, logo, button or as a percentage of screen height or width.
Now I’m turning my eye back to serving complete applications because I have a need to have a web app running under multiple devices.
Now I’ve been keeping my eye on XHTML2 and HTML5 in the hope of adopting this as my new starting application format for mobile devices and widgets.
XHTML5 has some handy semantic tags such as section, header and footer which make it ideal and scarily close to my old semantic format.
One of the issues is the sordid history of HTML5 . The short version goes something like this. (Please correct me If I am wrong).
A group (WHATWG) , unhappy with the speed at which the W3C was progressing with the next version of HTML, started a new standard called HTML5. This was eventually adopted by the W3C by forming the W3CHWG as the starting point of the next generation of HTML now commonly refereed to as X/HTML5.
There are three different locations where you can see the progress – its rather confusing if you don’t realise that the two versions on the W3C site are a delayed/filtered version of the same document.
Working Draft
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/
Latest Editors draft
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/
Current Draft
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/
As it says on the WHATWG’s website.
