1996 - 1998 Project HDML Client Phone.com Task Design & Prototype Tools C Solution Markup language

A Markup Language for Cell Phones

Phone.com began with the mission to bring the richness of the Internet to cellular phones. It was immediately apparent that the web's HTML was not an appropriate vehicle for a device with a tiny LCD screen. They came to Glyphic to augment their small engineering team and tackle the task of creating a new markup language. We were able to bring both our language design expertise and our whole systems approach: At the onset of the project, we not only considered the properties of tiny LCD screens, we waded through thousands of pages of cellular phone standards to understand the whole system of data and phones. The result was the Handheld Device Markup Language (HDML) definition, a complete first implementation and functioning web sites to demo it.

Over the last few years, Phone.com has come back to use us on several projects. We helped their, now much larger, engineering team bring to light what was learned from the first system, and helped synthesize a broad array of feature requests into a coherent design for HDML 2.0 and later 3.0.

Our relationship with Phone.com is a long one. It has lasted several years and we expect it will last several more. What works here is that we are like an outpost of their team. We can work both as a separate engineering group or closely integrated with them, as different phases of a project demand. Because we get involved with the whole team, we understand not only the project at hand, but how it fits in with the rest of Phone.com's business. This enables us to design products that work for them in the long term.