Noting that users of smaller devices like cell phones need a way to find their way through larger documents, Naoko Ito and Kazuhisa Manabe created XML Document Navigation Language (XDNL) and submitted it to the W3C.

The XDNL Note describes a vocabulary which allows a "user to easily browse a huge document on relatively small devices".

Designed to work with a variety of technologies for sending information to portable devices, including WAP and Compact HTML, XDNL provides a set of tools for creating smaller fragments from larger documents. In some ways, it combines concepts from XSLT, XPath, and XLink into a new set of tools for controlling the amount of information sent at for a given request.

Rather than simply compressing data to move it more efficiently, XDNL adds a level of user choice to help users screen the information they want from a given document and move quickly from piece to piece.