CMRL

CMRL, an initialism of Concise Message Routing Language, is an XML-based language used to describe how concise message content (such as cell phone text messages) should be returned in response to concise message requests. CMRL is to concise message content (e.g. text messaging) what HTML is to the web. CMRL files have the file extension ".cmrl" and have the MIME type "text/xml".

History
CMRL was developed in late 2007 by Scientific Media, Inc. to allow content publishers to create text messaging services for DOTGO, an extension of the internet to cell phone text messaging.

Publishing CMRL files
CMRL files allow a web site owner to describe the text messages that should be returned when a cell phone user texts the web site domain name to the appropriate short code phone number DOTCOM (368266), DOTEDU (368338), DOTGOV (368468), DOTNET (368638), or DOTORG (368674). For example, the owner of the domain name "example.com" might create a CMRL document at http://example.com/index.cmrl which would state that a user should receive the message "hello world" when they send a text message with the body "example" to the phone number DOTCOM (368266). This free text messaging service for the five top-level short codes is operated by Scientific Media, Inc. as the service DOTGO.

Validating CMRL files
CMRL files can be validated against the CMRL XML schema by using the DOTGO CMRL validator provided by Scientific Media, Inc.

CMRL example
The following code shows a hypothetical CMRL document for Example.com, which would be located at http://example.com/index.cmrl.

  
    Welcome to Example.com  
      Reply: 
       for news 
       for the current time
    
  



  
    
      There is no updated news today.
    
  
  
    
  

If located at http://example.com/index.cmrl, this file would define the following queries:

example
example news
example news time

If a user sent a text message containing "example news" to the phone number , they would receive the text message:

There is no updated news today.

in response. The user would also receive this message if they abbreviated their query to "example n", or mis-spelled it, e.g. "example newss".

If the user sent the text message "example" to the phone number , they would receive the text message:

Welcome to Example.com

Reply:
(1) for news
(2) for the current time

If the user then sent the text message "1" to the phone number , the query "example news" would get executed, and the user would again receive the message:

There is no updated news today

In this way, tags, together with match patterns, provide a mechanism whereby a CMRL file can define a text message menu (e.g. "Reply (1) for news"), while at the same time allowing a user to bypass the menu by "direct dialing" the content they want (e.g. with the query "example news").

CMRL resources
CMRL language tags are documented in the CMRL Reference Manual.