ZDNet has a nice summary about DIAL, the next generation markup language for mobile devices.

The interesting part is that Hakon Lie, man behind Opera and CSS amongst many other things, has doubts for success of DIAL; and sadly I have to agree with him. Users do define what eventually becomes/remains a standard despite the fact that W3 evangelists (like me) try to preach. And DIAL doesn’t stand a change for public success…

Let’s first take an example from the past… The road from HTML to XHTML is really rocky (see picture below from Google Trends - a great service). It has been almost a decade since HTML was officially axed and XHTML become recommended markup language for web (xhtml is the red line in the bottom of chart).

As for DIAL… DIAL is either too simple, or too difficult to success. After all, for advanced users there are already powerfull frameworks that allow device specific content targeting with XML+XSLT. And for simpler users DIAL is just too complex. I’m with Hakon on this one - the word wide web must be based on common set of languages that work on all enviroments.