Slashdot Mirror
WAP Under Fire
Recently WAP [?] has come under serious criticism from a wide variety of places... Angus wrote a
short piece
saying that it'll be replaced. IcesTorm-I sent us an
message on an IETF mailing list criticizing the format, and to suggesting that we use
open formats like
LEAP instead.
Even
Microsoft rejects the standard. Slashdot has supported WAP (well, kinda anyway) since I got bored a few months ago and slapped it together, and I'd tend to agree that its a crappy standard, but more due to the limitations of the devices that use it.
(note: if anyone has a PDA format they're dying for on Slashdot,
Send diffs -- not requests! We're working on some PDA formats, but there are only so many hours in the
day, and we don't have devices that can do most of the formats users email me asking for). [Updated 7 July 18:25 GMT by timothy] Readers may also be interested in a WAP report prepared by Rohit Khare for 4K Associates, which is probably the most incisive (and one of the most critical) analyses on the topic to be had anywhere.
Of course, phone screens are limited in size, and only a few people would enjoy the "hi-I'm-Joe-this-is-my-first-webpage-look-the-fanc y-animated-gif-and-my-very-k3wl-@aol-ema il-address", but designing a so-called 'standard' which avoid the masses to publish on the media, and, furthermore, calling this "the Internet", is, IMHO, a mistake. This is roughly the same as when Microsoft modifies its Java implementation. No wonder the IETF is critizing the standard.
WAP is the protocol equivalent to HTTP. WML and HDML are the equivalent of HTML. When most people say their Web sites are "WAP compatible", what they mean to say is that they serve up "WML or HDML formatted content."
For instance, does Slashdot REALLY run a WAP server/gateway, or do they just have some of their content in HDML (or WML) format, a la the RSS version?
Most content providers could care less about (and don't need to care about) WAP. It's not their problem. The cell phone manufacturers and the PCS service providers are the only people that have to care because they have the only devices that need to talk "WAP". Everything else is just gatewayed HTTP requests for WML or HDML content.
So what is it that people are really complaining about? WAP or WML?
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
GNU is already an idiotic acronym that stands for GNU is Not Unix. Example: "I gnu that would piss you off". Besides, Gary Gnu was a demented childhood nightmare for many of us. I cringe every time I hear it (though reading it is fine) I think GPL is a better acronym, just in the way it sounds, and has the added benefit of containing a nested recursive acronym, as opposed to simply a recursive acronym.
Meanwhile, here is a list of replacement GNU definitions to start everyone off:
Giant Nerd Unit
Grasp Not Understanding (glasshoppah)
Good N Ugly
Gonna Need Undies
Get New Uniforms(!)
Geeks Need Universities
Gandalf is Not Ungoliant
Giant Needless Undertaking
Got No Users
Going Noodle Up
Getting Nothing Unique
Girls Not Understood
Greasy, Nasty Unguent
Good News Undelivered
Group Needs Umpire
Get your Neices' Umbilical-cord
Gates is Not Ubermensch
Gates Needs Underlings
Glorious New U-turn
Gamma Necto Umbrus!
I find it very interesting to see all these Americans who don't get mobile technology.
Not only is wireless net access using mobile devices a very good idea, it has taken off in a big way in Japan (although not, in fact, using WAP, but another mechanism).
Given that SMS has also taken off, there seems to be a very strong demand for delivery of salient text onto a small mobile device. I see no reason at this level why WAP (or similar) won't be successful.
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>White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ruling class
That's WASP not WAP.
As far as I can tell WAP stands for Witches Against Puritans, and who can blame them? I truly dislike those Puritans, what with their flashy hats, turkey dinners, influenza, and new world order. Argh.
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
No, no. You want to jump OFF the bandwagon.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
The most common criticisms I tend to hear about wap are of the "Who wants to use the Interent with 4 lines of text" variety. Very few people know what they are actually criticising when it comes to the questions of
* What is WAP intended to do
* How does it differ from HTML and
* How will it improve in the future.
In my view, WAP is pretty well designed, but it's still early days yet. At it's simplest level, WAP is designed to be a method of presenting content to mobile devices, using the Internet as a carrier medium (my viewpoint). It differs from HTML in that it is a highly slimmed-down markup language, based on XML and including support for various phone functions, such as clicking a link to dial a phone number.
The more interesting part is perhaps where it will go in the future. Many people point out that it won't take too much extra computing power before your PDA can present HTML as well as a desktop browser. This is all well and good, but it doesn't take into account the extra funtions that are planned for WAP such as location based services, phone functionality etc. These are things that have no place in HTML, so a separate language of some sort is probably the best way to go.
Personally, I'm investing quite a lot of personal time in WAP with my wap search engine at http://wapwarp.com and a wap developers mailing list http://www.wap-dev.net (hop onboard if you are interested in discussing WAP development with other developers). I am not scared though to imagine that it will be replaced in the future with another standard.
However it's gonna take a bit for me to hop off the WAP bandwagon. I need to see handsets that support any replacing standard and I need to see a widespread buzz that will attract developers and investors.
Whatever the case, WAP is certainly helping bridge the gap between the stationary net and the mobile applications of the future - and that is what's so damn exciting about WAP.
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
A little planning goes a long way...
LEAP has some major advantages over WAP. It's faster, it isn't encumbered with expensive patented stuff, and its endorsed by the Internet Standards community. however, it is not here.
LEAP does not even have a foothold in the market; it is still on the drawing board. In contrast, the major Mobile Phone manufacturers like Nokia are directly benefitting from their membership of the WAP consortium; most mobile phone networks now support WAP servers directly licenced from that consortium at extortionate rates, have farmed out WAP-enabled handsets to their customers, and are now supporting the service. How do we get the manufacturers that are *directly* benefitting from WAP to support LEAP? how do we get the networks to set up and support LEAP when they are already set up for and supporting WAP?
--
-=DaveHowe=-
You can use SMS (short messaging service) for that. There are plenty of SMS gateways on the net and most modern cell phones support SMS. In the UK, anyway.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Why? Nobody wrote Enlightenment on their PDP-11. If your software doesn't recognize the limitations of your hardware, your software is useless.
That may be true. But nobody built a CD-ROM drive for their COCO either, I'd bet. Although the two technologies were coming around at roughly the same time. All I'm trying to say is that yes, there are now some hardware limitations. There is also a significant advance in the hardware coming and in process right now. Don't blow off WAP as not useful because of hardware limits, until we get past a few of those hardware limits (The recent story on printed mobile screens is one perfect example.)
"I'm not even supposed to BE here today!"
The nice folks at google run a HTML->WML gateway, enabling any WAP device to access all HTML pages out there. Just try something like http://wap.google.com/?u=www.example.com/example.h tml
--
bgphints - internet routing news, hints and ti
It's like this.
:_) can see the menu when he dials out for a pizza, can get the football scores of other games while he's at one (without having to sellotape a radio to his ear), and so on.
In the US, mobiles are still seen as luxury items. Everyone who has one not only has a PC in the office, but one or more at home.
Everywhere else in the world that just isn't the case. People from all income brackets in the UK have mobiles. People who can't afford a PC and certainly don't work with them. Over 50% ov people in the UK have a mobile, far more than have a PC and for all I know more than have _access_ to a PC.
So, they stand to become the most ubiquitous net access device. This makes them very important. Given the recent 'texting' post, SMS is apparently unknown in the US still. As pointed out in the discussion on 'texting' it is a very useful technology, and shows that there is demand for asynch. communication on mobiles.
WAP is simply a sophisticated form of SMS as far as most end users are concerned. It means white van man (not translatable outside UK
This whole thing really demonstrates the US's complete misunderstanding of the whole mobile comms thing. It makes me laugh.
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I have studied on WAP at work for a month. Here's what I find:
Dispise the fact that WAP protocol has a lot of problems others listed, telco have no time to wait to push the products into the market. It's the next piece of pie to fight for.
A WAP phone is not used like your netscape on a PC. But it is useful for circumstances where you don't have a PC or a palm with you. For instance, if you have a WAP enabled wrist watch, you can set it to alert you when something important happens. The one I'm working on is the fileangel project at www.fileangel.org which will let you choose to be contacted when something happens to your file via a WAP device. Another example is that you can set up your program to call you on your WAP phone when your stock price is at a certain level and prompt you to buy/sell. It can prompt you to read an email when a certain important email is recieved. These things are related to real-time communication applications. I feel that it is quite useful.
As of whether WAP is a temporary technology, it depends. Sure, displays are getting better, CPUs are getting smaller and less power consuming, but things are shrinking at the same rate. For example, maybe one day we will be able to carry a watch, or a pen, which acts as a phone, pager, emailer, voice recognizer, digital camera, scanner, GPS and mp3 player ALL at once.
Or maybe one day we will stick this wearable screen on top of one eye and get all of the previoes example's features, plus a full-size, see-thru screen. (How ever playing movies out of our penny sized CD storage?)
The point is, there is no end to our need for smaller, more powerful devices. There is a chance that WAP may survive.
Rob just can't win, can he? Before, when the code wasn't available, people whined that he was a hypocrite for promoting open source, but not supporting it himself and letting others hack the code. Now that the code is finally open, and he points out that anyone can provide code, people whine because he should write the code all by himself. He should just quit releasing his changes to the source again. leaches...
-BrentI believe that all doomed projects are a direct result of sucky acronyms. WAP is no exception. First off, it sounds like the sound a large rubber fish makes when slammed against the wall. Whap! Secondly, it's too open to defacement. Just off the top of my head, I can think of "Wimpy Application Performance" and "What A Putz!"
Think about more successful acronyms, like GNU. I challenge anyone to think of either a funny new definition _or_ a perverse way of pronouncing it. QED.
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
And what good is it? Well, as an example, I am hacking together some HDML (since my market in this area uses the UP.Browser) for the web site I maintain at dartfirststate.com. It's a transit system and I'm doing it mainly for my own benefit, although I hope others can benefit from it.
Basically, all I want to be able to do is to be able to punch in a bus route number and direction, pick from a list of stops it serves, and find times for the next few buses scheduled to arrive.
And since DART is looking into deploying nextbus technology, it'll will also be able to predict how many real minutes it will before the bus arrives. This kind of stuff is a cool application for a net-enabled phone.
The problem with WAP (besides the patent crap) is that people are trying to just port existing web sites to it. People don't want to buy books from their damn phone. There are specific applications that are good for it, but most of the existing web content SUCKS for it. For example, who the heck would bother going to stileproject.com from a cell phone? A site like that is best experienced in a dark closed room with a large monitor!
btw, I was surprised when I went to slashdot.org on my motorola 7868W and got a menu of stories. Unfortunately, when going to a story, I got an invalid content-type error... :(
The entire standard is supposed to be geared
towards low-capability devices. It is a standard
to fill a current need. I think it should be viewed as such. No one is expecting their watches or phones to have Quaking ability for the next few years, and this is where this standard comes in.
It also addresses some issues in its various substandards that I think are commendable. For example, XML is this huge hunk of text that has an extremely low content-to-size ratio. The WAP binary XML format is a good and simple way to reduce the size without resorting to processor intensive bitstream-compression techniques.
A good article on the problems of WAP protocols and formats has been on freeprotocols.org for quite some time. I suggest anyone interested read this article for a really good understanding of the issues involved.
My Freakin Blog
It means that the standard isn't a viable enough threat for Microsoft to go to all the trouble of embracing, extending, and extinguishing. It's along the lines of how some of the best praise is the hatred of thine enemies.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Asking content-providers to support a whole new protocol just for certain devices is the wrong approach. The right approach is to intelligently parse normal HTML and try to format it for the specific needs of the device, or ignore elements that can't be rendered on the device. For example, AvantGo does this for the Palm devices and other handhelds. It can automatically strip out images and tables (depending on setup). Web page designers can put in a meta tag "HandheldFriendly" to tell AvantGo to leave the tables in because they are designed to look ok on the Palm. This is pretty convenient, and I've used it successfully with some of my own dynamically generated pages.
Look.
The current generation of phones are pretty crap for accessing the internet. WAP just doesn't cut it. The phone manufacturers know this. They've known for years. They have a new generation of phones on the way (in production, not just design) with large screens and high bandwidth (faster than modem) network connections. More like PDAs than phones.
The networks behind these phones are going in to Europe as I type and will be available as soon as they can get their marketing arses into gear.
WAP is dead. No point in re-engineering everything towards it.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
You're not wrong, as they say... :)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
What really annoys me is this "access X-million Internet sites" crap. I don't want a number that so obvious "counts up from zero" like that; it means that tomorrow They'll increase the number as an excuse to charge you shed-loads more.
If they said "access loads of sites where the providers have got With It and provided WAP data", then they'd be saying the right thing, but they'd find out a big problem: there is no data on the WWW ("The Internet", d'oh), there's just frutzy graphics....!
~Tim
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~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
That's what business is. You provide a service that someone wants and get something in return for it. This could be pizza delivery, babysitting, carpet cleaning, painting, a ton of things. Rob provided a website. A lot of people 'wanted' it, and he got something in return.
The whiners that wanted the source, OTOH, just wanted to be able to use slash without having to give anything in return. It was Rob's site, and Rob's work. They should have written their own code if they wanted it. Instead, he gave it to you guys, and now what. You think you deserve to demand from him every little feature you desire. Well, like Rob said, it's not going to happen.
-BrentIf I want a particular PDA format to be supported, I'd expect the people who are paid to run the site to code for it, not me.
When I make millions out of Slashdot, too, then I'll roll up my sleeves and start coding for you.
There is NO IETF document on WAP. The link provided is a document submitted to the IETF mailing list (wich caused a lot of discussion on that list), but is not the work of a working group or any body within the IETF.
The problem that most people have on that list is the advertising. WAP phones are generaly advertized as "mobile internet" which is offcource false. WAP does not provide a IP layer it only provides limited proxied access to one of the many applications running on the Internet.
Now if the main benefit of WAP is surfing the web from a PDA or phone, could someone tell me why this is so great like all the marketings makes out it is?!?
I mean geez, in todays wired world, you are literally no more than 5 minutes from a computer anyway. If you want to surf the web, use the tool that is designed to surf the web ... a computer, or even a console ... anything with a decent sized screen. Why oh why would you want to use a mobile phone with it's postage stamp sized screen to surf the web is beyond me.
I think people forget that not every tool that we have needs to be able to do everything under the sun. But maybe that's just me ...
Someone please help me understand what all the fuss is all about? I want to jump on the bandwagon as well :-)
Explains exactly as much as I need to know about WAP.
Here is one positive usage of WAP - porn. Apparently its getting quite common to sign up for adult-oriented text and small, blurry pictures on your cell phone. Sigh.
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
What does that mean, "Even Microsoft rejects the standard"?
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As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.