HDML

Have you heard of a language called HDML? Not HTML. HDML.

In the flip-phone era, Japan's mobile carriers each ran their own web standard. NTT DoCoMo had i-mode with Compact HTML. J-Phone had MML. And au — then known as IDO or DDI Cellular — had HDML. Hard to believe now. Back then it was just how things worked.

The painful part of HDML was the WAP server sitting in the middle. Your markup got compiled to binary before it ever reached the handset's browser. No loose parsing allowed. One unclosed tag — error. Attributes in the wrong order — error. Think XML strict mode, but on a mobile phone in the early 2000s.

No Wi-Fi, of course. Connection speeds were painfully slow. Fix an error, upload, check on the phone, hit another error. Each round trip took minutes. Today yarn dev refreshes the browser the instant you save. Back then, one screen took a full day to build.

And you wrote that same screen three times — once per carrier, each in a different language. Server-side User-Agent detection handled the routing. Responsive design was not the word. This was the original multi-platform development experience.

Hands accustomed to hot reload are starting to forget what that patience felt like.