Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson, Siemens and numerous other industry leaders in the mobile communications and content industries have today announced that they are supporting the XHTML markup language (Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language) as the format for the future evolution of mobile services. The companies also expressed their intention to develop products, content and services based on the XHTML language. XHTML is the natural evolution of the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), which brings the WAP and the fixed Internet (WWW) worlds together. The group is also working within the WAP forum to support this technology evolution process.
In addition to handset manufacturers, a number of mobile operators have also announced support for XHTML. Vodafone Group, Orange, Radiolinja, Sonera, DNA, Telenor, Netcom, T-Mobil, TIM (Telecom Italia Group), RadioMobil and EuroTel Praha, have all announced plans to offer XHTML based services.
XHTML is the language that will be used to create all content regardless of whether it is for the fixed Internet or the mobile phone world. By narrowing the gap between wired and wireless content, this technology greatly accelerates the pace at which services can be created, and, as important, improves the usability of wireless services for consumers.
"XHTML presents us with tremendous opportunities to bring mobile services to the multimedia era. By converging the best of WAP and WEB, these technologies together will create the best visual user experience as well as a truly global and open market place for service creation. With XHTML, we now have a unique opportunity to start creating and implementing visually appealing, yet backward WAP-compatible services that will satisfy the requirements of the future as well as ensure a smooth evolution path for current services. Nokia is thrilled to participate in this effort," said Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President, Nokia.
"By bringing together all the necessary components to provide top-notch solutions for our customers via XHTML, we'll be able to merge the best of the Internet and mobile worlds," said Leif Soderberg, Senior Vice President and Head of Strategy, Motorola's Personal Communications Sector. "XHTML will bring an open and widely supported technology standard to the communications world; one which will provide new opportunities for all of us to provide a robust environment for application service creation while allowing for a graceful technology evolution for Motorola, our customers and our partners."
"XHTML is a technology that will bring the mobile Internet and regular web together and open a vast pool of content and applications to consumers. Ericsson will support this evolution both in our handsets as well as in our infrastructure and service network offering. Widening the business opportunities in the new mobile Internet world is key to Ericsson and we see XHTML is an important tool in doing that", says Philip van Houtte, Vice President Strategic Market Development, Ericsson.
"The XHTML technology provides the convergence to the Internet for wireless services. This will enable us to accelerate the development and deployment of highly interesting content and applications for the consumers, which is a critical success factor of Mobile Internet" said Georges Boulloy, Senior Vice President Product Operations, Siemens Mobile Phones, Germany.
Another important component to enhance mobile browsing experience with XHTML mark-up language are the cascading style sheets that will offer significant advances to how content is presented to consumers. The style sheets themselves are a major advantage, as they will make it possible to easily tailor content specifically for different handsets and offer many of the elements necessary to create a graphical user interface for services.
"Orange supports the development of XHTML and recognizes its importance to the convergence of the fixed and wirefree(TM) Internets, providing a common standard for the future," said Richard Brennan, Vice President OrangeWorld and Brands. "It will enable operators to deliver the vast content of the Internet to mobile devices, allowing them to offer a wide range of visually appealing services. "Orange intends to offer a seamless approach to wirefree(TM) data access and we welcome any standard that assists us in the delivery of services to our customers whenever and wherever they are."
"The success of Mobile Internet will largely depend on the availability of suitable content and applications. Flexible and open standards like XHTML that offer compatibility between the fixed internet and the mobile world will greatly help operators, content providers and application developers in creating visually rich and easy-to-use mobile applications," says Anni Vepsalainen, Senior Vice President of Sonera Mobile Operations.
"As a multichannel e-services provider DNA Finland Ltd is excited about this development and is looking forward to implementing the standard on its platform. XHMTL will give us the opportunity to seamlessly and efficiently move between various access methods. This development will speed up the migration of the content to all networks more easily. This will result in the entire industry being able to achieve the vision and dream of 3G," said the Managing Director Reijo Syrjalainen, DNA Finland Ltd.
"T-Mobil welcomes the wide support of XHTML. The format is an important step towards the convergence of WAP and WEB and will give new impulses to innovative mobile multimedia services," says Rene Obermann, CEO of T-Mobil.
"TIM strongly supports the development of data transmission on mobile networks - said Mauro Sentinelli, TIM Managing Director - in compliance with the company strategy, aimed at maximizing data transmission services, from the server where all the contents lies through the radio- mobile network to finally reach mobile phones. In this regard XHTML technology represents a fundamental step in the evolution of mobile telephony."
"As a mobile operator it is important to us that our mobile services are easy to use. XHTML gives us the opportunity to develop user-friendly mobile services for third generation mobile telephony. The fact that many producers support XHTML, is promising news in order to reach a global standard for the protocol," said Mikael Kluge, Director Mobile Internet at Europolitan.
"XHTML will give us the opportunity to merge content from the fixed Internet world with the mobile phone world in an easy way. The challenge, based on use of standard style sheets, will be to tailor content specifically for different handsets from the huge amount of content from the fixed internet," says Trond Wiborg, Vice President of Telenor Mobil, Norway.
"NetCom believes that XHTML is an important step forward to combine all competing markup languages in a common standard," says Sondre Aarrestad, Director Interactive, NetCom GSM AS. "Consequently, we will see a convergence of the mobile markup languages around XHTML. The introduction of XHTML in WAP 2.0 will enable us to rapidly deploy new services in multiple channels (e.g. WEB, WAP, PDA) and at the same time reduce the cost of maintaining these services."
In addition to handset manufacturers and mobile phone operators, a number of other companies have announced plans to launch XHTML services, application technology and content creation tools. AOL, CNN, Sabre, Macromedia, Adobe, Oracle, and others are expected to support XHTML with their products and services. Additional announcements about these collaborations will be made over the coming few weeks.
"CNN continues to remain in the forefront of wireless content services by distributing CNN Mobile in a variety of formats to our partners worldwide," said Mitch Lazar, Vice President Wireless, Turner Broadcasting System. "Adopting this new, open standard, reinforces our commitment to deliver CNN's news and information service to people anywhere, anytime and on any device."
"We commend these industry leaders for making this commitment to XHTML, which is the next step in making the broader web available wirelessly," said Richard Siber, Accenture - partner, Communications & High Tech. "In order for the wireless industry to realize the true benefits of content, the entire power of the web needs to be unleashed to the developer community. Ultimately, this platform begins to eliminate the challenges that the burgeoning mobile data industry has experienced to date."
Alex Felker, Senior Vice President for AOL Mobile said, "The industry's move to provide support for XHTML in their browsers allows content and applications vendors to publish in more robust formats while maintaining back-compatibility with current WAP content. Vendors can use this capability as a bridge to the creation and dissemination of next generation interactive content in the wireless world."
"More and more travelers are looking to the Internet for their travel information and planning. In addition, they want the convenience that wireless devices offer to keep them informed of changes to their flights or other travel plans," said Cindy Groner, Director of Mobile Travel Services at Sabre. "Sabre is committed to leveraging technology to provide these and other services to enhance the travel experience. We believe XHTML is important key to these efforts."
"Adobe, the leading provider of web content creation tools, is committed to enabling next generation web applications that deliver rich content to customers, anytime, anywhere, on any device", said Bryan Lamkin, Senior Vice President of Product Marketing at Adobe. "It's critical that the technology industry supports open standards --such as XHTML -- as we move from traditional web publishing to a network publishing environment."
"The Macromedia Dreamweaver platform is built on Web standards, so we are always working to ensure our developers can extend their products to leverage new and emerging standards such as WAP and XHTML," said Tom Hale, Vice President of Marketing for Macromedia. "With the jointly developed Nokia WML Studio for Dreamweaver, we have already been working with Nokia to make authoring of WAP and Web content seamless, and we plan to ensure developers have an intuitive way to deliver their content to both Web and wireless audiences."
"The adoption of XHTML by the wireless industry further demonstrates that open, standards based protocols are critical to accelerate the growth of advanced mobile applications," said Rich Green, Vice President and General Manager, Java Software, Sun Microsystems. "Together with Java technology, XHTML provides developers, carriers and manufacturers a robust, flexible platform for wireless content and services."
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