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.

Comments

My $0.02

[Wind_Walker]

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.

WAP could have been cool

[Salsaman]

I worked on an application for IBM, which would have allowed people to pay for goods in shops using just a WAP phone - no need to carry cash or credit cards around any more. The money would be transferred instantly, and the shop would straight away receive an email informing them that the transaction had gone through.

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.

WAP porn?

[artemis67]

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?

I *only* use WAP for sports scores

[deepstephen]

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! :)

Kill WAP now!

[dublin]

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.