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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Well, best of luck to you, but I think you are just a bit too biased and on the wrong bandwagon. But, that's just my opinion.
The main problem with WAP, as I see it, was that it was a case of them (the phone dot com people) wanting to make a bunch of money, so they decided to create a "standard" and thus try to drive demand. Sorta backwards in my opinion. Sadly, a lot of the PCS phone people jumped on board because of the fear of being left behind, and thus the cWAP hype was borne. Despite all of the shortcomings, the norrible nightmare of web developers to try to accomodate all the different "standards" supported by the different browssers plus this WAP cwap, and then add in the fact that it's next to useless on the phone.. well.. it seems that the demand for this product doesn't exist for a good reason. No amount of supply will overcome a horrible idea.
Take a look at the way the Europeans have addressed their wireless devices and you will see they are light years ahead of the US. Probably because they don't spin their wheels and waste their time with bad ideas like WAP.
Anyways, best of luck to you.
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 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)
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
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.
Try this url:
o de =url/u=slashdot.org@2Fpalm
http://wmlproxy.google.com/h=en/g=@26amp@3bwmlm
this uses Google's html2wml filter to give all the functional goodness of slashdot's Palm Pilot offering (including the top ten comments with each story) in a reasonable WML format.