With a deep uneasiness, I stood squinting into the setting sun, standing at the corner of Second and Mission. In all four directions, commuters scurried down the sidewalks as I tried to remember where exactly that electronics shop I needed to find so badly had moved to. My fingers twitched as I envisioned my Web browser, sitting idle on my desktop machine back in the office, and its now-coveted bookmark to BigBook. Two seconds, I thought, and I'd have the name, address, phone number, and detailed map. Of course, that was back at the office, and I was resigned to search out a phone book - that tired, old-media relic.
What I needed, of course, was a nifty little gadget - a mobile and well-connected personal digital assistant that could grab that crucial bit of information at this particular moment. I had no need for streaming video or Shockwave extravaganzas. Nor was I interested in headlines rendered in 18-point Antiqua bold. I needed clean, pure information, delivered instantly, and, to be honest, I couldn't have cared less what browser that information would be "best viewed with."
The hardware solutions exist now. Get a Newton or a Pilot, or even one of those keen new Web-enabled cell phones. But on the software side of things, you'll either be strapped with a hacked shell of a Web browser or, worse yet, some bizarre, proprietary information tool with protocols dreamed up by an engineer over the weekend. Either way, you're screwed if you actually want to surf today's Web. Netscape and Microsoft, in their infinite and public battle over the Web's standards, have seen to it that HTML has become a mishmash of inelegant and incompatible tags. Add to that the bandwidth-sucking eye candy that ensures Web sites "brand awareness" and "corporate identity," and you're left on the corner, lost and decidedly unwired.
Enter the handheld device markup language. With the same sort of idealism engineered by the architects of the Web, HDML offers an alternative to the feature-rich world of the hypertext markup language we've got today. This is not to say that HDML is handicapped - quite the opposite. In fact, HDML offers the power of pure information access within the context of the extreme interface limitations of the devices it's designed for. If it helps, try to imagine a graphic-free version of HTML with forms support on a 12- by 4-character display.
The language comes from a company called Unwired Planet, a year-old start-up that's been licensing its wireless Web-browsing technologies to the big cellular networks. Unwired Planet knows how to play the Web game, too. Using the language is royalty-free, and they've submitted the spec to the World Wide Web Consortium.
Here's how it works: Your cell phone has an IP address and a browser built in. When you switch the device on, a menu comes up displaying the feature set - information services, address book, email, etc. Jumping into information services, you see a list of the usual catagories: news, weather, and sports. When you select an information provider, your phone sends a request over the cellular packet network, which arrives at a sort of proxy server at your wireless service provider (like MCI, or CellularOne). It passes the request off to the content provider as a simple HTTP request. The content provider sends back the appropriate HDML file, and then it shows up on the phone's tiny screen.
So the transportation is basically the same (in fact, you can use a standard Web server to send out the files), but how is HDML different from HTML? First off, you should stop thinking about pages. The language revolves around three types of "cards" - or types of screens that can be displayed. "Choice" cards offer navigation through Web sites or between them; "entry" cards are the equivalent of HTML forms, allowing users to answer questions or enter data; and finally, "display" cards are used to get data on the screen. There are plenty of options for formatting how the text is displayed in the available real estate, what actions are associated with what buttons on the phone, and options for links and even images. You can take a look at the full language proposal if you like.
So, should HDML be something completely separate from HTML? Should HDML be reworked into XML? And even in a perfect world, can content written for a screen really be repurposed for a handheld device? These are big architectural issues; issues we'll tackle in future columns.
But for now, we can at least start imagining a time when directions across town are a click away, movie reviews are delivered to your palm as you stand in the video store, and you can stress over your stock prices while sitting on the beach.
For better or worse, the Net is stretching ever farther.
