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WAP Forum Adopts XHTML For WAP 2.0
earache writes: "This story at Infoworld.com talks about how the WAP forum is moving away from WML and adopting XHTML as the markup of choice for WAP 2.0."
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Actually, yes, it's big news that it's going to use TCP instead of UDP, at least in the mobile telephony space.
Politically, Phone.com (the original developer of WAP) has very much wanted to keep WAP 2.0 on UDP; the various p.c browsers don't generalize well to TCP. Meanwhile, there are other micro-browsers out there which handle XHTML and HTML over TCP/IP on phones as well as handling WAP over UDP/IP; p.c doesn't want to lose market share to them.
From a user perspective, if your phone supports TCP/IP as well as UDP/IP, then protocols like SMTP, POP3 and IMAP4 are available directly from the phone. Users don't need to go through the carrier's WAP gateway and read mail in the browser. You can see why that's convenient.
So, yes, it's a big deal, both to the people in the industry, and to the users of the phones.
If they're going back to TCP/IP and xHTML, then WAP is plainly and simply dead, dead, dead.
I never liked WML much, but WSP/WTP and WTLS are pretty good at handling high-latency, intermittent connections. This is something TCP/IP and SSL don't do well. If what was quoted is true, then I think they are thowing the baby out with the bathwater.
Remember the famous last words of Socrates, "I drank what?"
Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare
Of course WAP is going to be replaced when we have Broadband wireless, but unless you have the trillions of dollars and a million men to update all the basestations, and backbone network to support it, its not going to be overnight.
People expect TOO much too quickly. If you remember a few years ago.
People using 2400 baud modems, to connect to BBS's. Technology replaced the BBS's and modems with High Speed Internet Connection and Webservers.
WAP is a toy? I disagree again.
Just cause the basic content is fluff, doesnt make it a toy.
Some of the more "business apps" ive seen are Delivery services, Public Safety, Work Order systems, Ticketing systems, Instant Messaging, Commerce, and on and on...
IMHO - Brook Harty
Actually, I work at the largest CDPD telco in the usa. Thought ID add some info to your post.
1. All the CDPD phones do have an IP address, and does have a TCP/IP stack.
2. Big Brother doesnt have a Cozy relationship at all, we demand warrents and only after legal says ok, do we release information. (IF we log it!)
3. CDPD is flat fee now, and the basic service is free.
4. True true, Marketing loves to spoon feed you, but it pays the bills.
This is what I'm saying for years. Once the froth settles down, the market is not going to accept phones which offer a restricted service for which you have have to pay a premium over the unrestricted equivalent. It's like paying extra to peer through the letterbox in a glass door.
If phones which offer TCP/IP to the device are available in the same market as phones which offer WAP to the device, the WAP phones will die -- they cannot possibly succeed. Phones which offer TCP/IP to the phone are available, therefore WAP will die.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
For the love of "standards", first it was HDML, then WML, and now finally they decide to go with real open standards.
You know, you just can't download a new browser to your phone. You're stuck with it. There are still phones being sold today that have the UP.Browser 3.0 in them which only supports HDML. Then there's UP.Browser 3.1 which has some support for WML and UP.Browser 4.0 which I'm not even sure any phones have that one in it yet.
So now we are finally going to go with XHTML and all us sorry web developers who try to hack together a page that supports WAP devices have to develop the same content for even more languages.
It's just frustration, that's all. For example, Apache has nice content-negotiation features but they are all but useless because every browser has to advertise that it can handle everything. My Motorola 7868W when hitting web sites via the verizon wap gateway, sends out an Accept: string that includes text/html as accepted with no quality value associated with it, as in "I prefer X-HDML or WML but I'll take text/html if you have absolutely nothing else."
No, can't do that I guess. So one has to hack together a script to parse the browser string for UP.browser, get the correct version number out of it, then decide on your own what content to serve the browser....
Such simple ideas that would make the world a better place interopably and they are never done.
For example, for chrissakes, damn Internet Explorer still says it's Mozilla... And they ALL say they accept */* with no q= qualifier... :(
Okay, a couple of points - in the UK we consistently get up to 800m with a 100mW output power with an 11Mb Symbol set, and considerably more than that with the US's 1W limit. This isn't that bad.
Also - If you need more than 20 concurrent users in one area you can place more than one Access Point at each site. I know the Airport is not quite as intelligent as the Symbol kit, but it still copes okay with this setup.
I still think that unless we go for a realistic picocell environment across the whole country then it is pointless to replace the current GSM setup - although I do want my Symbol 1740 Palm device with laser scanner and 802.11 with telnet + html browser apps to work everywhere...:)
Frog51
Whoever wrote this at InfoWorld clearly wasn't at the WAP Forum. The consensus has been for over a year to get rid of all the stuff that was reinvented and use standards instead where appropriate; examples of this include replacing the WSP/WTP/WDP stack with wTCP. But this is the first I have ever seen about replacing WML, and I am very sceptical that it will happen in WAP 2.0.
Sure, there has been workshops on XHTML regularly at the Forum, and there's lots of interesting discussion, but give me a draft spec and some rally around it, and then I'll start believing it's going to happen.
Right now I don't. Not for WAP-NG, anyway (commonly branded WAP 2.0, although that version number decision lies with a committee).
There's tons of different interests trying to rubberstamp lots of different technologies as part of WAP. This is half politics, half paperwork diving, and 10% technology. Over 600 member companies are trying to further their own business interests by influencing the WAP Forum. The result can only be described as... well, look at any parliament and you'll see the same effect in operation.
XHTML may be interesting for now, but WAP-NG is going to throw away the reinvention and stick to standards where available, not add new unknowns.
so this is certainly a very important step to integrate mobile devices which have some kind of "internet connectivity" with the rest of the online community Until now wap seemed to me like more or less useless but hip thing. Were I live (Austria) all 4 major mobile phone providers are allready offering confentional wap service(portals, the ability to read news horoscopes and such, integration with outlook, etc.) but still i haven't seen one application which made me think: "hmm, This could actually be useful. Of course it would be nice to read e-mails "on the run" but for those purposes i would use something like the nokia communicator or my notebook. It's just *painfull* to read a e-mail on a cell phone display. Also the 9600 baud which gsm offers right now aren't exactly what i imagine(even though 9600 are certainly enough for telent and such) for real mobile internetaccess. GPRS and finally UMTS(when i finally becomes a useable technology(which some people like Nicolas Negroponte doubt) will hopefully solve this problem. My personal opinion is that WAP will not only be moving toward "normal* internet standards but will become obsolete once bandwith and mobile devices will allow users to just mobile connect to "the internet", maybe with small modifications(screen sizes for websites and such) but still without a seperate protocol like WAP.
"Mommy, mommy! The garbage man is here!" "Well, tell him we don't want any!" -- Groucho Marx
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
that "FIVELA" is actually a SIXLA, while "SIXLA" is technically a FIVELA.
Congratz. I have been working for a WAP/WML Company for a while. One of the stumbling blocks of WAP was the restrictions WML imposed on style and compatiblity. Hopefully by moving to XHTML we would have a much more standard way of describing information to wireless devices and reduce the time needed for messy wireless hack jobs. And also this paves the way for WAP to become the defacto standard world wide. I now have more condifence in WAP than i-mode (we were looking into i-mode due to the limitations of WML).
--
If you ask me, the reason WAP hasn't really taken off is because the screen is too small to look at Pr0n on. I mean, it's like an inch wide, nowhere near big enough for proper 'browsing'...
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
WAP is mainly just a toy, as you say, but there are some fun/useful applications - getting stock quotes is useful, and well suited to WAP.
On the fun side, I am quite addicted to the fortune service from Excite's WAP site (sample: 'you have a talent for talking to weirdos').
So far, that's it - for me the killer app on my mobile phone (Nokia 7110) is the SMS - it has T9 predictive input to cut down on button presses, and I can use an SMS to email gateway to send short emails directly from the phone, without a lengthy WAP login sequence. There's also a gateway from email to SMS but that seems overloaded.
Of course, these email applications are not provided by my mobile service provider (Orange), who are reassuringly clueless and don't even have a suggestion box on their WAP site that I can see. All the more argument for opening up WAP services - walled gardens are only good if you have very talented gardeners, so let's open up WAP with more commonly adopted standards and direct-to-phone protocols.
I've been playing with XHTML recently. I found a program (the W3C's HTML Tidy program) that will take normal HTML and convert it automatically to XHTML.
Once you have a webpage in XHTML, you can use all the XML tools on it. For instance, I converted Google search results to XHTML, then used an XSLT stylesheet to convert the result summaries to a RSS file suitable for syndication.
I didn't have to write perl, or compile anything for this to work - it was all done using stylesheets and Tidy.
What's the point of this? I don't know yet - but I am thinking of lots of useful stuff it could be used for. Imagine a site like Slashdot automatically inserting a box of relevent google search results next to every story - no more excuses for not doing research on a story.
There's huge possibilities out there.
But with meaning.
What I don't understand is why wireless technologies keep going for new standards. If wireless providers are moving towards PCS (requiring a tower every 1 1/2 miles or so), why don't they just adopt 802.11 for their devices, and get 11 Mps throughput? That sure beats trying to cram everything into a new standard for people to have to adopt.
"You seem like a decent fellow. I hate to die." - The Man in Black, from The Princess Bride
"We welcome 3G". How much ya wanna bet this guy doesn't even know what 3G stands for, much less what 2G and 1G even were. These buzzwords are starting to give me headaches. I think that marketing drones are under the assumption that as soon as you give something a TLA (Three Letter Acronym) it becomes significant.
I'm sure the new WAP is going to be useful, but come on, is it really news that it should use TCP? The XHTML stuff seems cool though, it'd be good to have a lingua franca. (See, even I'm doing it; at some sub-concious level, I give XHTML more credibility because it's a FIVLA).
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
However, BTCellnet's Short said there are some practical reasons for taking this "walled garden" approach. That approach makes it easier to ensure security, control spam e-mail, carry out billing, and account for use of the content provided, Short said.
Security is achieved through the right measures in the first place, not by limiting what the client can access. Spam control has nothing to do with limiting the phone to a few selcet information portals. Billing should be easy at the outrageous charges that exist, even if they switch to a bandwidth based instead of time based billing system. Billing for content use is a revenue model that has already proved unacceptable for general internet users, what makes them think it is going to work here.
At least they gained a clue regarding WAP vs XHTML.
I guess I'll buy one when it works right, not how they want it to work.
Bleh!
Of course, it'd be a lot better if everyone would sprinkle their <acronym title="eXtended HyperText Markup Language">XHTML</acronym>-code with <acronym> and <abbrev title="abbrevation"><abbrev></abbrev> in a way that should be quite self-explanatory from the use meta-use above. Those tags are, if I'm not all wrong, mandatory to pass Bobby-certification. Too bad no (?) graphical browsers support them in a sensible manner.
The only device I will find usable will be one that has enough color depth and pixel resolution to display normal HTML pages. Heck, the palm pilot does a pretty good job with simple HTML right now.
Work on getting good displays and good bandwith into these devices, not devising dumbed down standards that make an attempt at allowing you to order books in a 50x60 pixel display.
-josh
It seems like all the phone companies are really running wild about the new possibilities with 3rd generation mobile voice + data transfer, aka UMTS. All the prototype devices i've seen so far seem to feature full-fledged WWW access, color screens etc. Who needs WAP anymore as soon as the first real UMTS apps are out? I think WAP needs another year or two to advance from its current state as an overpriced toy, and by then UMTS will be up and running and WAP will seem really obsolete
an electric guitar is a great stress redirector: it pisses off my neighbours but relaxes me sooo fine...
You're totally wrong.
How will mobile services impact "the entire WWW"? What does censorship have to do with it?
The article mentions that some providers limit what users can access. Not all do. If you are in the market for a WAP phone, ask the provider. If they say, "Yes, you will only be able to access the sites we have bookmarked for you," take your money elsewhere. They are in the business of making money, and money doesn't grow on trees, it comes from your pocket.