The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today recommended a standard to help handheld computers and smartphones communicate with Web servers about displaying content.

The schema, the Composite Capability/Preference Profiles (CC/PP): Structure and Vocabularies 1.0 (CC/PP 1.0), is a system for expressing device features and user preferences using the Resource Description Framework (RDF), a spec that makes Web applications work with Web servers.

CC//PP is being shepherded by a W3C working group that includes Ericsson, Nokia and Sun Microsystems.

While many rich applications using XML (define) or XHTML (define) run on a host of devices from different vendors, they don't all provide access to Web content because there was, until now, no standard language to communicate that data, W3C spokeswoman Janet Daly said.

"There was no way for a server, unless you were using a desktop, to get content," Daly told internetnews.com. "Developers were trying to create specific content by hand for every device using XML and XHTML. It was possible for a Web content developer to create scripts using XSLT (define) that can transform content into the forms needed, but how would you know what form you need?"