Half of the spam I get these days is from online gambling sites, inviting me to visit them and make my fortune. Hey, maybe these spammers will wise up and not waste their time spamming the.au domain.
If that were the case, then all Allston has to do is ban us from visiting porn sites and checking out get-rich-quick schemes, and I won't get any spam at all !!!
But they didn't invent a whole new set of protocols. WAP runs over TCP/IP, on port 80 (HTTP). If you telnet to a WAP site on port 80, and type "GET/\n\n", you get WML spat out at you (similarly, if you telnet to a web site on that port, and type "GET...", you get HTML).
There have been a number of minor new protocols created, but as far as integrating into the existing Internet is concerned, the only new ones worth worrying about are the protocols for content (WML, WMLscript, WBMP, etc). These protocols had to be created in parallel to their web equivalents (HTML, Javascript, jpeg/gif/png) primarily because WAP clients don't have the grunt to handle them, and to a lesser extent because of the 9600 bps network restriction.
Protocols also had to be created on the telephony side of things, but they had to be created anyway, because there was no existing set of protocols for this sort of data over GSM. I'm not aware of any reason why the telephony-based WAP protocols couldn't continue to be used in the future, just adapted to GPRS, or 3G, or whatever (although I'm not a telephony protocol expert).
To me, it seems that the content protocols have been the big problem. There's a huge web out there, all written in HTML, and WAP phones can't access it. I would estimate that maybe 0.0000001% of content on the web is WML, and therefore suitible for existing WAP phones. And because there's virtually nil WAP-accessible content, WAP is pretty much useless at the moment.
Once WAP (or WAP-like) phones are able to handle HTML, they will become popular. They won't be able to handle HTML until a) the clients are good enough for HTML (ie. fast processors, more memory, better displays), and b) the network connection gets faster than GSM 9600.
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If that were the case, then all Allston has to do is ban us from visiting porn sites and checking out get-rich-quick schemes, and I won't get any spam at all !!!
Sigh. Somehow I don't think so.
There have been a number of minor new protocols created, but as far as integrating into the existing Internet is concerned, the only new ones worth worrying about are the protocols for content (WML, WMLscript, WBMP, etc). These protocols had to be created in parallel to their web equivalents (HTML, Javascript, jpeg/gif/png) primarily because WAP clients don't have the grunt to handle them, and to a lesser extent because of the 9600 bps network restriction.
Protocols also had to be created on the telephony side of things, but they had to be created anyway, because there was no existing set of protocols for this sort of data over GSM. I'm not aware of any reason why the telephony-based WAP protocols couldn't continue to be used in the future, just adapted to GPRS, or 3G, or whatever (although I'm not a telephony protocol expert).
To me, it seems that the content protocols have been the big problem. There's a huge web out there, all written in HTML, and WAP phones can't access it. I would estimate that maybe 0.0000001% of content on the web is WML, and therefore suitible for existing WAP phones. And because there's virtually nil WAP-accessible content, WAP is pretty much useless at the moment.
Once WAP (or WAP-like) phones are able to handle HTML, they will become popular. They won't be able to handle HTML until a) the clients are good enough for HTML (ie. fast processors, more memory, better displays), and b) the network connection gets faster than GSM 9600.