Slashdot Mirror
WAP Bashing
Tube writes "There's been allot of WAP smack these days, some kicking of the WAP dog when he is down, and even some spitting in the eye of WAP, but it's still moving forward. The Wireless Section of DeveloperWorks is running a feature that tells you where it is and where it's going. XML and WML 2.0: XHTML is giving WAP the fuel to keep it righteous." The feature has some good points; but I still find WAP to be almost entirely useless to me, compared to how it was supposed to have walked my dog, cooked dinner, dry cleaned my t-shirts, cloned me, traded currency derivative and played bridge well. Ah, well, I suppose that's an issue more of hyping then the actual protocol.
Perhaps another case of Marketing driven bloat.
I am me...I think
Sure, buying stocks from your pda/phone might be cool bragging rights, but really, is it worth it?
FP?
wap seems to have just gone away, 12-18 months ago companies couldn't get enough of it and develoers were jumping from html-apps to build these wap things and now most have gone back to html.
:-)
has anyone actually used a wap hone and found it really useful beyond impressing colleguges? IE5.5 is better than a nokia anyway
Do Unto Others As You Would Have Others Do Unto You - ONLY HARDER!
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.
Oddly enough I was just trying to access /. through a wireless card in my iPaq. Although in the FAQ, CmdrTaco claims that if I visit the site in a WAP compliant browser, I should see a WAP version of the page, it just doesn't happen. And the regular page is too busy to read on a small screen (in fact, scrolling is extremely slow). Instead of the auto-detect feature, I like what WebTender is doing...they have a seperate URL for WAP browsers, wap.webtender.com. Using a seperate URL in conjunction with an "autodetect" feature seems to be the best way for a site to go.
I have a wap phone (a siemens s35i) and I must say, ehre in the Netherlands I have found the wap phone quite handy. It enabled me to check if there were any traffic jams on the roads, wether the trains were on time (no!) and it was also very handy to keep up to date with the news, especially in the light of the recent tragic events.
I tried WAP.
It failed me.
Maybe I asked too much? I doubt it. I've still yet to find a half-decent WAP Email provider that can give you a decent, free and fast email service that doesn't literally take you 10 minutes to write a 20 word email.. Do I think it'll take off? No. Maybe G3 will? Who knows.. Too many technologicial flops and licensing drama's of late..
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story..."
This feature is enabled by strapping your phone to the dog collar and shooing fido out the door. When the walk is done you simply call your dog home and yell "Come home Lassie!!"
The protocol was great (is great) for sending messages that you don't care if anyone else sees.
The two main problems I had with it were 1) the devices it was used on tended to have screens just slightly larger than my thumb - which again is perfectly fine if you want to send and display a message that says "you suck balls" to your friend in LA, but if you want to render out a page, then it looks god awful and you have to use short words. and then 2) it isn't secure at all, and it is slow... I guess that's really 3 there.
I work for a company that sells telcom software and I was given the task of porting an entire e-commerce site over to WAP - in about 2 weeks - which I did. but it was total idiocy - the number of forms and pages you had to go through was stupid and then it wasn't secure.
the only real good use of it was if you registered on the web via a computer, and then wanted to do small updates to your account via your handheld (buy more mins, recharge a pin, see your bill status).
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Why do we need WAP? Why not just use HTML or a subset there of? My NTT Docomo Cell phone by NEC works just fine as is. So did my J-Phone cell phone by Sharp. I can read Slashdot from the PDA section. I can read my own webpage. I can use the Yahoo PDA section, the Amazon PDA interface, the Google PDA interface. The ZDNET Japan iMode interface etc. The standard already exists. I'm sorry if I'm ignorant of what WAP is trying to solve.
When is Slashdot going to be available on WAP anyway? Is it already? It hasn't come up on my phone when I've tried.
It would be nice to get the list of headlines and be able to select the headline I want to see the main story. Reading through comments could be more tedious, but doable with a little UI work.
WAP is a great way to check your E-mail on the road too, if you don't have a PDA to hook up to.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Trading currency derivatives is one place, at least, where WAP has succeeded. Check E-gold[e-gold.com] for their WAP client[pcs.e-gold.com]. This allows you to do E-gold spends and also check your account from a PCS or WAP enabled phone.
I was impressed when I saw that, as I had previously thought WAP was simply vapour.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
I use it all the time.. mostly to get my slashdot fix and check my email.. but slashdot wml generator is a buggy piece of garbage that usually returns content that's not to the standard and my phone can't display it.. Maybe I'll have to rewrite it for them. :)
However, it never got past the demo stage, I think because banks were worried about upsetting the card companies. It's a shame really, I thought that could have been a killer app for WAP.
I-Mode looks a lot better. Check out this Wired article from last month.
Having see an internal IBM presentation on WAP 2.0 in February I think WAP2 shows real promise. Especially if you think of it as a step towards another version of WAP. Moving to XHTML Basic, ECMAScript, TCP/IP and other REAL standards shows a real willing to move towards an open way of working. I really think that htis is a step in the right direction and people should be kind to WAP 2.0 without prejudicing it becasuse of WAP 1's deficiencies.
I rather prefer a palmpilot + cell phone combo to a wap enabled phone, ok it's cumbersome, but you can do a lot more, I fell kind of inprisoned when trying to do something in a Wap phone. To me that's one a the major problems with wap or some other dumb protocol, all the apliances tend to use just the basic stuff. I mean if there wasn't wap maybe they could have something like a pilot-cell phone working already... (don't like the nokia, no software for it)
I don't know about anybody else, but I frequently use Yahoo Mail's WAP interface to check my email on my cellphone. It's very useful. I suppose that it's useful to day-traders out there to get up-to-the second stock prices, but those people are boneheads, anyway.
My problem with WAP is the daggoned flaming hoops I have to go through to develop WAP applications. For example, the Palm . Yes, you get the emulator up-front and free. But to make the emulator useful, I have to sign up for Development Resources Seeding Program to get ROM images. This includes snail mail, as exampled in the e-mail they sent me:
If you did not download the legal agreement in PDF format, please do so now by returning to the signup page in the Provider Pavilion. You must sign and return TWO (2) copies of legal agreement. (Faxes will not be accepted). Please allow 2 weeks to process your documentation.
So unless I've got a burning project, forget about doing this stuff as a hobby, or in my case, for a charity I'm involved with. I'll just go install some Open Source groupware product with minimal WAP capabilities.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
The most prevalent application for WAP is porn... My goodness, how desparate are these people for sexual gratification that tiny 1-bit images of nekkid women gets them off?
The trade press uses a hype / bash cycle to attract readers and sell
advertising. Think about the headlines you've seen on WAP, Java, or
for that matter Linux. WAP is an emerging technology - first gen
wireless Web enabled phones have limited display areas and limited
input capabilities. By analogy, think back to 1994, and browsers
like "Mosaic", "Cello", and "Netscape 0.92". Then take a look at
what's being currently coming to market - Kyocera has a very nice
phone that combines a phone with a Palm, Nokia has phones that open
up to reveal larger color screens and small keyboards. WAP is
evolving and adding functionality. And companies are developing real
and useful applications for these devices. Wireless devices are not
going to replace the Web anytime soon (probably never). They will
supplement the Web, particularly dealing with time-sensitive data
and transactions. Wireless devices are well suited for handling
time-sensitive information and tasks. For consumers, think
financial and travel related transactions. For businesses, think of
technical data, sales information, and messaging to employees in the
field. Neither WAP, nor any technology will live up to it's early
hype in the trade press. But I think wireless devices and WAP will
grow, evolve, and find important mainstream applications.
Bob Platt
Senior Architect
CheckFree Corp.
[Insert pithy quote here]
WAP Push is a new feature in V1.2(?) of the specs that allows WAP pages to be pushed out to (willing) subscibers. This will make WAP _very_ usable.
Think about the issues now. Finding a page, typing in usernames/passwords, searching for content, and finally buying the goods...what a nightmare on current browsers with only a 9 digit keypad. If I could sign up for content I wanted on my phone and it pushed it out to me when it had updated info with a url embedded in the message that took me to exactly the page I wanted to view and allow me to action that in one or 2 clicks, then I would be happy.
Case in point: There are a bunch on bands I want to see in London but I can't be bothered checking the listings everyday and when I do finally find a band I want to see its normally an impulse buy. I would much rather it just sent a WAP page to my phone with a link back to a site where I could buy tickets right then. perfect.
Which also brings me onto the point that half the reason current WAP useage sucks is that the UI's that are being designed suck and require way to many clicks to get to the content you want. Also the Telcos are not making it easy enough for users to set up their WAP hoimepages and provide great content.
[Please type your sig here.]
There is really nothing badly wrong with WAP. The protocol itself is quite good, it just needs to "mature" a little bit.
The problem itself is in the WAP browsers (being "non-standardized"), the phones (too small displays) and the cellphone nets (just too darn slow and expensive).
The phones (getting more "PDA:ish") will get bigger displays, and the connection speeds will improve, eventually. But until then, it doesn't seem that useful. I'd really like a good WAP email service (which could be used with what's available today), but I've yet to see one.
There are 010 kinds of people. Those who understand octal, those who don't, and 06 other kinds of morons.
I have a Nokia 6210 and I've hardly used WAP at all. Except for one thing.
:)
I go to football matches (that's soccer to you Americans) with my Dad every weekend, and it's great to be able to stand in the middle of the stadium and find out the scores from all the other matches in the league at half-time and full-time. Everyone around me always listens in while I read the scores out.
Previously we used to have to find someone with a radio while we were leaving the stadium, and strain to hear what was going on, and make sure we didn't lose them in the crowd. This is a big improvement on that, and it's a really killer feature of WAP. The only problem I can see is that because everyone wants to know the scores at the same time, the one decent WAP scores service gets slashdotted at 4.45 every Saturday afternoon!
--
Karma: Chameleon (you come and go)
That is so much an urban ledgend!
That's like the meme about the anti-pornographry laws passed in Japan by the occupying American forces resulted in the loophole that allowed tentacle-rape hentai to proliferate.
There is no McDonald's in Vietnam.
Okay, the speed is not really on par with dialup. It is quite expensive too, I admit that, but I can use any regular ISP that supports dialup. A bit more than 0.12 € per minute is fair while on the move or during emergencies. This morning for example they shut down our internet connection (because of the Nimda worm) and I checked slashdot + my mail (with an attachment of about 300K,...important document...) in about 10 minutes. As far as I checked, WAP costs about the same for less functionality.
So I think that you have to expect that, with the raise of the processing power you predict, you will see PDA/Cellphone integrations with real browsers that cope with real ISP's. I don't think that situation will be far off, since right now I do it with two devices. No more WAP needed, it has become obsolete.
It is quite disappointing that you didn't elaborate on the extra functionalities that WAP offers except the "click to dail a number" thing. I would have been interested to *know* what I'm missing. (Because click to dial...well, ehm...doens't sound very usefull to me, just annoying).
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Face it, the only thing that will ever be able to walk your dog, cook dinner, dry clean your t-shirts, clone you, trade currency derivative and play bridge well is Emacs.
WAP ain't shite, it's just not what the marketdroids say it is... but then again, is anything?May we live long and die out
So does this mean we're WAP-ing WAP?
Sorry, I couldn't resist. You probably wish I could have.
Obviously, nobody wants to use a service that has so little features as WAP, but if you could actually access the whole web, it would have been great. But it would require people to code for device independence.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
...compared to how it was supposed to have walked my dog, cooked dinner, dry cleaned my t-shirts, cloned me, traded currency derivative and played bridge well
Don't forget that much of the big WAP PR occurred in 1999 and 2000, during the dot-com goldrush. Back then, every technology carried such far-fetched promises.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
Until the pics get better than this then the fave portable pr0n format is still going to be jazz mags.
Noboby uses it
Fortran 90 is the fastest and best language for mathematical modelling
Nobody uses it
Why I hear you ask? /phone
1) In both cases there exists something that is a little bit slower or incovinient, but much easier and cheaper for a novice to use
Fortran --> mathcad / C++
WAP --> newspaper / radio
2) Everybody thinks it is crap or obsolite, the result being that those that might have a use for it ignore it
3) People who do use it get discouraged and critisise it when they try using it for something inapropriate. (A bit like entering the great shark in the dune buggey race)
WAP like fortran has a time and a place
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
WAP isn't just stupid, it's a bad thing: At it's core, it's very important to recognize that WAP is nothing less than an attempt to replace all open standard Internet protocols with proprietary (and not particularly well-designed) W-equivalents.
There is absolutely no reason why standard HTML, HTTP, and TCP can't work in the wireless world - WAP is a waste of time and money, these protocols aren't necessary today (except for terminally crippled cellphone browsers that people generally refuse to use), and as handheld devices gain more compute power, they start to need the real protocols anyway, so WAP is more of a hindrance than a help.
Oh, and there's that whole ugly proprietary problem, too.. Sadly, WAP is the OSI of this decade. It too will yield to the unstoppable juggernaut of open Internet protocols, but not before countless millions of dollars and man-hours are spent trying to force another bad idea on the world.
If you're not familiar with OSI, go back and read about it - OSI was a suite of "elegant" protocols (as opposed to the crude but effective IP) that most of the academics and digerati viewed as "the right way" to do networking in the 80's and 90's. There was one problem they overlooked: IP worked well and was interoperable, OSI could claim niether of these attributes. Marshall Rose has written that OSI can be quite instructive in illustrating the way things should NOT be done.
I think the same is very much true of WAP. The death of WAP, when it finally comes, will be a good thing.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
I don't want to write emails on my phone...I'd use a Blackberry if I wanted to do that.
But the phone is great for getting movie times, yello pages listings and stock quotes.
The WAP "Standard" is closed and uses proprietary technology. There are efforts underway to develop truly open alternatives. http://www.freeprotocols.org/wapTrap/
With a good artist and writer you can have a popular comic on WAP, Flip&Mick has been around for 400+ episodes so far and you can check it out with WAP phone/browser at (Remember IE is not a WAP browser):
http://wap.movingentertainment.com/hosted/flipmick /nokia/
- Raynet --> .
But the mess of non-standards, the must-pay-minutes business model, keep dragging the USA about 2 years behind the rest of the planet.
Ask VoiceStream about WAP or exchanging SMSs with non-VoiceStream GSM users ...
Their customer support does not even know don't even know that they run on GSM, and that they block incoming SMSs. Forget WAP, USA is the 3rd world of wireless. That's what we get for being so self-absorbed and isolationists.
If only USA would cooperate on standards with the rest of the world...
I never hated WAP, like most people. I just saw it as a cheap easy way to get essential information. Perhaps WAP will get overtaken by some other protocol - so be it. For now it gets me the daily news when I'm on the bus or the John.
.gone days of lower budgets. Imagine you have a bunch of sales people and representatives who need data in the field. Usually these people will use laptops which somehow have to be online through a network/mobile/phone - whichever way is a hassle - booting up the laptop, finding plugs, waiting to connect.
However, one use is particularly useful right now, in these
With WAP it's a breeze. Not if you need excel sheets or word documents, but if you just need numbers it is. Server-side WAP is a piece of cake to install, so all you need is a few scripts online which generate WML with the data your employee needs, and there he has it. The big advantage is that this is such a cheap solution, which before would require a laptop or access at the clients place. Now you can have your info within a couple of minutes without the need for wires and batterymunching laptops.
HOWEVER, as I understand, WAP was designed with location-based services in mind, and when that becomes a reality, WAP will kick ass.
-Kraft
Live and let live
People like to eat shit all over the world it seems. That's two great products: software shit and food shit. Are you proud of it?
Check out the amazin WAP porn site "XXXpics" using the tagtag emulator.
Too funny....
-Kraft
Live and let live
Just fix the bandwidth to mobile devices problem and we get real web access - no need to dumb it down into a useless level of funtionality.
I much prefer WASP bashing myself, it's the only group it's PC to bash after all...
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys" P. J. O'Rourke
My, that's mighty elitist of you. Nothing succeeds like success.
Previously we used to have to find someone with a radio while we were leaving the stadium,
Are your stadiums shielded against radio waves? Here people have been going to the stadium with a miniradio in their pockets for years.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Waste of A Protocol
:)
(-1 troll)
When is Slashdot going to be available on WAP anyway? Is it already? It hasn't come up on my phone when I've tried. It would be nice to get the list of headlines and be able to select the headline I want to see the main story.
I don't mean to sound like a wag, but it should be fairly easy to roll your own WAP Slashdot headline deal. Here's how I would do it.
perl -MLWP::Simple -e 'getprint "http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rdf"'
Of course, I don't know squat about WAP, so all that is just off the top of my head...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Jakob Nielsen went to DemoMobile and he says "Last year, most start-ups based their systems on WAP phones, but virtually all presenters now see WAP as a doomed technology. Think of the hundreds of millions of dollars that could have been saved last year if the VCs had bothered running a WAP usability study."
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
No: I consider VW's success, for example, as a good example of high-quality products coupled with excellent marketing etc. Same for Sony (Japanese), Apple (American) (before the nineties and after 1997), etc.
I really consider McDonalds shitty food, both in terms of quality as well as taste. And M$'s software as the worst possible breed of the kind. They both have excellent businessmen running their sales, and they are in bed with politicians (at least Micro$oft), giving a great example to the young generation:
you can produce a shit of a product, breaking laws here and there, stealing ideas and other companies' creativity results, as long as you can bully other people. A great American icon, right?P?
SMS is fine for texting. I don't want dozens of crappy spam emails sent to my phone thank you very much. If companies send me phone spam I have the option of suing them big time, which I don't with email.
With web-like content, I find it handy for rail timetables - I just enter my start and end locations and it works out the best connections.
HTML pages are nowhere near useable enough for WAP sites - they need to be made especially.
Unfortunately railtrack's WAP site dies on the final page now (aargh!). Do I blame them, my telco or Nokia? I guess I need a firmware upgrade.
>>>
There's been allot of WAP smack these days, some kicking of the WAP dog when he is down, and even some spitting in the eye of WAP
PR: After much consideration, we've decided that the WAP 2.0 technology should reflect current market and reputation, therefore the resolution was accepted with a majority, and WAP 2.0 shall be named WACK!.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
WAP should be *way* faster than it is over one2one at the moment. Do they have a 386PC somewhere running vbscript to compile the WHTML from all external sites or what? It should take 2 seconds to download a page, not 10.
"allot" - to parcel outa ll ot
a %2 0lot
http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=
"a lot" - to a very great degree
http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=
ShoutingMan.com
You drink you stink
You boose you loose
You toke you choke
You smoke you croak
...is 'cos generally it's on 'devices' with tiny little screens. Not many people's idea of web browsing involves screens which can only manage about 6 lines of text - and yes, I'm one of the few who've actually tried it.
Basically it's like surfing on a lolly-pop stick.
insignificant sig
I still don't see what the 'big deal' with WAP is. I mean, hell, go back a decade, and we had this great little thing called 'gopher'.
Plain and simple thing is, it worked. Then people put out clients like 'TurboGopher' which would launch external apps, so you could view pictures. Then someone came up with this 'HTML' concept, where we could make whole pages of pictures.
Shortly after, we end up with 'NCSA Mosiac', and then that parasite 'Mozilla', hogging 4 simultaneous connections for each page request. Shortly after, some prick comes up with the 'let's sell the crap I make in my garage' concept, and we end up with folks buying up every '.com' address (back in the days when it was $100 for 2 years), and businesses suing them to get the domains with their name in 'em, so that they can try to sell more crap that we don't want.
All the while, people give up on usenet, and move towards 'message boards' like this thing I'm posting on right now, and they trade in IRC for ICQ and AIM, and their muds for MMRPGs [which well, compared to some of the decade old muds out there, was a massive step backwards].
So...in the end, you have to ask yourself... is WAP solving a problem that anyone actually had? For the most part, nope, it's just that people have forgotten about that great thing called gopher, which well....worked.
WAP will probably come and force all new kinds of traffic on the internet, so that the folks still trying to post on message board web pages that WAP, IM and MMRPGs are sucking down all of the bandwidth, so they're lagging while trying to post. {Just like I did, when I'd bitch about damned web surfers wasting bandwidth while I'm trying to mud)
um....for those who can't tell -- I'm mostly joking...the real reason that WAP sucks is the same reason that HTTP sucked in the early days, and why people kept using gopher -- gopher was better organized. It took folks like Yahoo [which now sucks ass] and Digital [altavista] to come up with some good ways of finding information.
It's going to take some better marketing, and some user interface testing for folks to realize that we don't want to take 10 min and click through 20 some pages to get someone's phone number, when we can just call information, and even if we might have been able to do it faster, we don't have the time to dedicate to learn some new system of menus and crap like that. [Hell, I'm getting pretty good at getting through all of the menus to get to my voicemail at work, but it took me a couple of weeks to not use the patterns that I use for my cell phone voicemail]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
That's WOP, not WAP. It stands for "without papers", refering to immigrants not having proper documentation when they arrived to the U.S. This was common among Italian immigrants in particular. The acronym stuck and became a slur.
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
To use HTML, a mobile device would have to limit itself to some arbitrary subset, which is bad because every device manufacturer would choose a different subset. To standardize on an XHTML subset actually sounds like a good idea.
I'm sure those web browsers are great as long as you stick to the particular HTML subset that they can handle well. And I'm sure they suck when you don't.
I thought a WAP was an Italian person?
Oh well... daegos the neighborhood.
Spank me.
HAHAHAHAHHAHAAHAHHAAH It's "a lot", it is NOT "allot", and it is not "alot". Man /. reporters write like third graders!
The problem with WAP in the US market :D
1. The US market is too fragmented
2. Slow rollout of 3g networks in favour of intermetiade solutions
3. You guys still have pagers
4. Cost purchasing spectrum.
5. Not enought content.
I use WAP for email, news when im traveling. But its Too little content, too slow and to dev on wap involves using the W* protocols which is an arse to code. WAP 2.0 will be based on existing protocols thankfully to make it easier. But WAP in itself is predicted to be dead within 4 years in favour of broad band wireless solutions (3G).
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
The feature has some good points; but I still find WAP to be almost entirely useless to me, compared to how it was supposed to have walked my dog, cooked dinner, dry cleaned my t-shirts, cloned me, traded currency derivative and played bridge well. Ah, well, I suppose that's an issue more of hyping then the actual protocol.
I wouldn't worry too much Hemos, I'm led to believe that Bluetooth will do all this Real Soon Now.
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.
TCP cannot work great in the wireless world. It was designed from the ground up assuming that losing a connection is the exception, not the norm. TCP Tahoe/Reno (Congestion Control) and basic networking concepts like SAR (segmentation and reassembly) and sliding window are quite different in a world where you might lose your connection for a few seconds every minute or two, versus TCP which assumes >99% uptime.
TTCP, another standard, is better suited for wireless than TCP, but alas, it isn't natively supported by most OS's.
WTP really is better suited than TCP. Also, WDP is defined to be the same as UDP for bearers supporting TCP, but what about protocols like SMS that are not TCP based? WDP provides a clean abstraction for sending datagrams when TCP/UDP/IP are not present.
HTTP is also poorly suited for wireless (3G is still a ways off). The headers are large and verbose, thus very inefficient. WSP is a good substitute for HTTP because instead of having sending twenty or so bytes to send "Content-Type: text/html" you send a single byte.
Where WAP sucks is WML. WML is currently overly restrictive and doesn't let you get the rich layout that HTML gives you. WML 2.0 will alleviate a lot of these problems, but I think in general, when most people say things like "WAP Sucks", they are referring to the quality of the underlying network, the small screen size on phones (there are several WAP browsers for PDA's), or the limitations of WML.
WAP and WML are such a cool concept. Think of it, the ability to access any information available on the internet, on your cell phone! However, people see that it costs too much ($10 per month), and they realize that text on a cell phone looks like DOS running on a 9" monitor. So, it appears that WAP/WML is going the way of Clear Pepsi (you remember that stuff). Great concept, cool advertising campaign, but, when the reality struck people, it was too much to handle.
My Kyocera QCP-6035 is a PHONE and it renders HTML using HTTP over TCP. It all works great, and although I don't get graphics (unless I use a non-ROM browser, such as AvantGo's), that is a feature when you are paying for 9.6-14.4 kbps cellular airtime.
The QCP-6035 phone has WAP, but I've never used it. Why bother?
This link: http://www.4k-associates.com/4K-Associates/IEEE-L7 -WAP-BIG.html may be useful.
none of you guys know what you are talking about. Shut up and go take a networking class. You people are the ones that are always blurting out information in class that is totally irrelevant and distracting with the only purpose to try to impress the teacher and make yourselves look good. Just shut up and listen. You might learn a thing or two and not look so stupid when there isn't a teacher around and only your peers at hand.
I use WAP on my Nokia 6210 to check my e-mail if I'm away from a computer, and if I'm expecting an important e-mail. Optus Networker has a nice POP3 client.
I also occasionally use Lokate, a location based service that tells you where the nearest things are, like nearest train station, pizza place, pub. It's based on your cell ID, so it's not terribly accurate, but it can be handy at times. You can even use it to find out where another Lokate user is currently located (it's protected by a PIN and opt-in)
The main reason I think people see WAP as a failure is due to consultants and industry analysts misunderstanding what it is, and getting everyone to think it's the Internet on your mobile.
It's also too expensive and too slow to dial into on circuit switched connections. GPRS should fix that though.
This post is a karmawhoring rip-off! The proof is here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6429&cid=95196 2 a post I made over a year ago when the opinions expressed here made more sense!
Gah! What's galling is that the karma-whoring worked, the guy got modded up to 4 points anyway! Oh well, no damage done!
A little planning goes a long way...
i prefer bap washing. oh well.
Well, the Weak Anthropic Principle was never terribly controversial to begin with, and --
--oh, not THAT WAP? Sorry.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers