Okay, so you can't really make phone calls and send SMS messages using only HTML; that would be silly. However, if you are developing web sites and web applications for mobile handsets, you can take advantage of some features in XHTML Mobile Profile which make it easy for a user to call a number without typing that number in. You can also use the same mechanism to trigger - on the user's handset - an SMS or MMS dialog with the intended recipient's number and the message content prepopulated.

He includes three examples if it in action (using PHP to render the page) - creating a link to make a call from the HTML, sending an SMS if the text inside a link and doing the same with a MMS message. He uses the WURFL project to make it all work and code snippets are included.

SMS messages have become ubiquitous in most of the world. As with any commodity technology, those who make their money off of it are always looking to expand it so that they can charge more. In the SMS world, there is the MMS, Multimedia Messaging Service. Developed by the Open Mobil Alliance MMS is designed to deliver rich content messages over packet data services.

That's all well and good but without the proper tools how are you going to message (spam) the cell-phones of your closest 25,000 friends with the latest release (obeying all relevant copyright laws, of course) from your favorite band? Well fear not, Stefan Hellkvist over at hellkvist.org has rushed to your rescue. The library, MMSlib, is used to encode and decode MMS messages in PHP.

There's no tutorial here, just information about the library and more pointers to the site. The MMSLib code is released under the GPL.]]> Thu, 06 Apr 2006 07:33:31 -0500