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Nokia consistently releases products late. I don't know if they are just too optimistic when calendaring product releases, or if there's good business reasons to do so.

Interestingly enough, delays in product rollouts were forecast when Compaq and Nokia announced collaboration way back in 2000:
http://www.wapforum.org/new/20000911158Com.htm. (The prediction is there, although there's a lot of text to scan)

Apparently, Nokia's corporate culture still finds delayed rollouts to be just fine, as we've seen from the N90 and N91... which is odd, since Nokia's profit margins have been eroding since 2004, due to lack of available products in the face of increased competetion from Motorola, et al.

The main point you're missing is that WAP is not specifically a document formatting system. That is just one element of WAP.

There is an interesting overview of the WAP system and the protocol stack here

WAP is a stack of protocols used for communication with mobile devices. HTTP can be carried over WAP too.

The reason I think WAP is unpopular is that it was a more advanced feature of mobile phones that people found too hard to use. The more technically oriented people who did use it have now moved on to more advanced "smartphone" supporting native HTML/HTTP and built-in full-featured TCP/IP stacks.

There seems to be some confusion about what WAP is (including in some modded-up postings).

WAP is a family of protocols, documented here.

WML is an obsolescent markup code that is part of the WAP family. It has been "replaced" by XHTML Mobile Profile in the sense that phone manufacturers recommend XHTML-MP as the forward path. It has not been replaced in many phones that are still in the active user base.

Many people suggest that current Web standards (XHTML + CSS) mean there is no need for specialized support of handheld devices. This opinion generally is held by people who (a) do not actually use phone-based wireless browsers and (b) have not read the XHTML-MP standard and have not yet discovered that it might be nice to, for example, click and dial a phone number.

Basically, it's a serialisation of XML using a tokenisation system - tags, attributes and even values become tokens, and has extensions for unknown items.

It also has extensions for string tables, where commonly used words or phrases can be given, with a lookup into the string table index used.

Although it doesn't actually compress XML per sé, it does do a fairly good job (unfortunately, I don't have any figures to hand).

It's just amazing to see even technically oriented people making just immensily moronic comments about WAP being dead because "they look bad and work slowly".

Are they braindead? Haven't they noticed that the WAP standard is a large stack of specifications - from low and multiple transport level specifications to the presentation layer. Most people seem to be blurred and think that WAP == WML. The presentation layer is just a tiny piece of the big picture.

So, the presentation layer was not that fancy - so what? Were you around when there was gopher and Mosaic came - was it fancy? (In my opinion yes). So it sucks, now it has been fixed.

Alright. The first ugly presentation layer might have given WAP bad credit, but wait a while and see....you can do a whole bunch of Amazon stuff with it.

Nope, WAP does not run on top of TCP/IP. Take a look at this slide from an overview presentation of WAP (slide from the official WAP site, wapforum.org). Even if the address you enter in your WAP phone is an IP address, it does not necessaraly mean that WAP uses IP. WDP might use the same address format as IP, or they are using some IP -> WDP address translation.

This is why WAP needs to have a proxy - even if WAP sites could speak WML natively over HTTP/TCP/IP, it still has to be translated into WAE/WSP/WTP/WTLS/WDP by the WAP proxy.

Nope, WAP does not run on top of TCP/IP. Take a look at this slide from an overview presentation of WAP (slide from the official WAP site, wapforum.org). Even if the address you enter in your WAP phone is an IP address, it does not necessaraly mean that WAP uses IP. WDP might use the same address format as IP, or they are using some IP -> WDP address translation.

This is why WAP needs to have a proxy - even if WAP sites could speak WML natively over HTTP/TCP/IP, it still has to be translated into WAE/WSP/WTP/WTLS/WDP by the WAP proxy.

However, the WAP Usability Report which you can purchase for download from useit.com (which is an excellent site for learning how to write good websites) says that people just don't like WAP.

From the report summary:

When users were asked whether they were likely to use a WAP phone within one year, a resounding 70% answered no. WAP is not ready for prime time yet, nor do users expect it to be usable any time soon. Remember, this finding comes after respondents had used WAP services for a week, so their conclusions are significantly more valid than answers from focus group participants who are simply asked to speculate about whether they would like WAP. We surveyed people who had suffered through the painful experience of using WAP, and they definitely didn't like it.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

More information about WAP here! (What is WAP? FAQ here).

More information about WAP here! (What is WAP? FAQ here).

There are already (or will be in near future) mobile phones which have integrated GPS capabilities. See for example Benefon Esc! from "the other" finnish mobile phone manufacturer. This phone doesn't yet enable "push-style" location based services but I'm sure future WAP enabled versions will. See the rele vant specification from the WAP forum.

The thing to realize is that in WAP you have a proxy/gateway sitting between the cell phone and web server.

Judging from the Wireless Session Protocol Specfication at http://www.wapforum.org/what/technical.h tm it looks like most of the session handling stuff is geared to handling the connection between the phone and proxy.

In a perfect world we'd simply use cookies to track session just like in HTTP, but sadly these don't seem to work reliably yet in WAP. In the meantime, you'll have to resort to either passing session identifiers as form variables or else in the URL.

For anyone interested, I'm working on an overview article on how to add wireless users to your web service. The draft lives at http://dev.arsdigita.com/asj/wireless/.

WAP is either a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant... or go to Wapforum.org

It is unfortunate that they should pick this name. The name is currently used by the WAP Forum in their Wireless markup language.

I figure they are aware of this.

Another issue (totally off-topic but where else on Slashdot exists for such discussions?) is that Slashdot articles are effectively dead only 6 hours after the initial posting. This site used to be better in 1997/8 when the Slashdot attention span was about a day or two.

Recently I have been working with XML and XSL to see how the relavent content of any site can be presented to a hetergenous group of browsers. For the technical stuff check out Apache's website and in particular their XML stuff. A friend of mine is nearly blind so he and I spend quite a good deal of time talking about issues surrounding accessibility and what new technologies can do to enable him to take advantage of the internet. Often he and I share the same frustration of visiting a web site and being assaulted by all of these graphical images, fixed size small fonts, and general clutter. Sometimes it is a real pain to search through data to find what we are interested in. I think if sites can start using XML and XSL a lot of these problems could be solved. XML allows a content developer to tag the data they are presenting for what content it represents (i.e. on a music site with a track list from an album you might see tags for artist name, album title, track title, etc). XSL allows these site developers to specify how to present that data to the end viewer's particular browser. So you could make a style sheet for MSIE/Netscape, lynx, WAP, an audio browser, a palm pilot, etc. I have already requested that my webmaster install support for XML so that I can redo my pages to be more friendly for text based browsers, audio browsers, PDA based browsers, etc.

A simple thing, aside from websites, is unified messaging. I have been using JFax just as a place to get voice mail and faxes, since I don't have a home telephone number. You can also use JFAX to get and send your e-mail from any account that is POP-3 accessible. For my friend, this might be the easiest way to communicate via the internet. And yes that JFax link I provided is for the affiliate program so that I get a commission if you sign up.

Given that companies are trying to make their websites as accessible as possible in the hopes of being able to sell more and more products, I don't think we have much to worry about in terms of the future. Just think about what has happened with WAP in the last year or so. Certainly on a small cell phone screen one cannot use the images and annoying fonts that are used in a graphical browser. I think the future is looking bright for all those who suffer some form of visual impairment. Think of how much harder it would be for them to interact with the rest of the world, if there were no internet.

That being noted, I'd bet this is 99% publicity...

See the WAP Forum What is WAP page.

WAP is an API for making systems which interface with mobile phones, specifically the kind marketed to the "I'm so cool I need to surf the Internet on my mobile phone" set. You can find more about WAP here.

WML is like HTML for mobile phones.

there will need to be a "compression extension" because XML is verbose, thus making messages large.

This isn't a problem.

• Compression belongs at the presentation layer (and preferably below transport), not at the application layer. XML content is certainly bulky, but it squashes very well. I've spent the last few weeks benchmarking verbose XML travelling over dial-up modems and anything that has the slightest compression smarts squeezes it right up.
• There already is a compression extension for XML. It's part of the WAP / WML work, where XML is really trying to squeeze itself down a thin pipe. It's currently very tailored to WML, but that's fixable.

Here's some links to resources where you can learn more about HDML (WML), and WAP (Wireless Application Protocol).

A quick definition of HDML from whatis.com
"What is HDML?", at w3.org

Another short definition of WML from whatis.com
The Wireless Application Forum - good resource for wireless info.
WAP, from both a technical and practical perspective.


It should be noted that HDML (Handheld Devices Markup Language) and WML (Wireless Markup Language) are, more or less, the same thing.


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| big bad mr. frosty
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You also might want to look into the use of WML, an XML-based markup language similar to HTML, which is used in WAP phones. Here's a link to the WAP forum.

--Kynn

Take a look at http://www.wapforum.org for yet another approach to thin client architecture. This is the stuff that is going to get stuffed into pagers, cell phones, PDAs... most of the big players are adopting this emerging standard.