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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.
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.
>Suggestion: use some proxy such as Betsie....
..or use wap.google.com, which does similar,
but better and actually useful.
MR