I've seen everyone being very excited about WAP and then everyone loathing it.
I personally only see it as part of a necessary evolution of protocols, a good starting
point for competing protocols to emerge and not necessarily a depracated protocol and architecture
which just may have its own place in the wireless market, not from a bandwidth
standpoint but more from a usability standpoint. Cellular Phones being the first widespread
major non-desktop computer devices becoming "internet and web"-enabled I tend to question the
virulent attempts to "make phones like computers" and mold them into existing models of user-interface
and transport protocols while completely negating the various benefits consumers could get from
a very basic user-interface to access very topical data.
1) The WAP protocol itself, with focus on the Wireless Markup Language
WAP is not a bad protocol, and I would add that it is a rather good protocol that meets the goals it was developed for:
Limited Bandwidth
Limited Screen Real Estate
The wireless markup language offers great flexibility to interface with phones with limited capabilities. I've been working with it ever since its creation and thru its (at times) painful evolution. Interacting with a phone is quite different from interacting with a desktop computer and a mouse, a lot of out-of-the-box thinking had to be put into the development of this markup language, how to go from one screen to another, how to loop thru all the links within a screen, the concepts of DECKS and CARDS that let you minimize useless downloads of information and optimize navigation, the various ways to send data to a server through different input mechanisms, user-input validation to minimize errors and downloads. If thoroughly thought-out, a wireless web application working with the WAP protocol can be a very useful tool for every day life.
2) Why WAP phones? Why do less?
I personally, currently don't *need* to be surfing the whole entire web on my phone. Not right now. With work and personnal research I do from home and at my office, I already spend all the time I need using the Internet to its full potential. And I'd much rather like to be sitting comfortably in a chair at a desktop computer while I do all that.
When I'm on the move and/or going out with friends, I don't necessarily want to have a full-featured computer in the palm of my hand. Not worth the money, not worth the weight nor the size of an i-mode (I bought the Motorolla StarTAC for its compact size). I know it's tempting, I'm all for snazzy gadgets, I do have quite a few, but frankly, I don't need it right now.
However, I'd often be hanging out with friends and suddenly one of us would ask: "I wonder what's playing at the theaters located near the Derby, Hollywood, anyone up for a movie before going out dancing?". I get out my StarTAC Sprint PCS phone, connect, go straight to the wireless interface of my yahoo, go to movies, key in a zipcode, get a list of theaters in that area, pick one, see movies playing, pick one to get the times, and boom!: In a matter of a few seconds I get all the information I need. How's my EarthLink stock doing today? same thing -> my yahoo, stocks, select ELNK (which was part of my list of the portfolio I had set-up), see stocks details.
The nice thing about WAP phones is that they don't allow SPAM!
no ad banners
no useless images
clear, simple and well presented information: when you have such limited screen real-estate and bandwith, it FORCES web applications developers and interface designers to put a MUCH stronger emphasis on USABILITY, which a lot of web sites currently lack.
The above are my usual replies to the obvious question "why do less when you can do more?" Hopefuly, with much-needed healthy i-mode competition arising, the price of WAP phones and services will go down. There might still be a market for those phones catering to more low-end users, people like me maybe. I would expect i-modes to be a raging success among teens, who as everyone know, will LOVE to be connected ALL THE TIME and do all kinds of entertaining stuff on their gadget. i-mode also seems a much cheaper alternative to computers + internet connection. Some other people already get enough connectivity at work and at home and don't need additional entertainment on that but wouldn't mind a phone that gives them the option to look-up some very topical information every once in a while.
3) The Real Issues / Why so much hate?
a) Symptoms...
A lot of i-mode's hype among developers comes from the fact that "it does HTML!". Hurray, that means developers don't have to re-think nor re-do any of their site to cater to i-modes! Hey, being a developer myself and having dealt with quite a lot of markup languages I'm all for that too. Then I can't help but wonder: What would http://www.wired.com/, http://www.slashdot.org/, http://my.yahoo.com/ look like on an i-mode? How nicely do framesets render? What about ad banners? Does it handle complex nested tables? Then I read "well you should optimize your site to deliver 'compact HTML' or cHTML". Ok, now that makes a little more sense. You do need to rethink your site a little. At least you don't have to learn that very complex new markup language called WML, you might "waste" a whole half day of your life learning it. And the interface and site flow can pretty much remain the same! All valid reasons...
b) Diagnosis...
But I believe there is a much deeper issue that lurks around the corner when I look at the strong resistance from so many people to WML.
-> Change <-
A lot of people praise the i-mode because it is closer to already existing standards like HTML, thereby solving implementation nightmares. People will one day have to face the fact that HTML *might not* be THE answer to all web applications. Who knows what task-specific web-enabled devices will come out in the next few years? One can't guarantee HTML will the the appropriate markup language for all of them.
I personally don't think i-mode and WAP phones are ready to compete on the exact same level because they don't necessarily serve the same purposes nor markets, yet I keep seeing people writing big controversies about "WAP vs i-mode".
Over the last 5 years, a good part of the Internet community has learned to live with a now well-defined "vision" of the "The Web", with a well-defined set of protocols that are known and understood by all developers, and in the last year, with the demise of WAP, it has become a more popular belief that any "web-enabled" device should fit within that same original vision.
c) Solutions... ?
People and developers will have to learn to live with the fact that new standards SHOULD and WILL arise, and that it's the only way we can build stronger, more user-oriented web applications. If we don't explore all options that are currently out there, how can we certify that our current standards are the best?
"The Web" will evolve to serve a wider array of purposes, and it is not unreasonable to think that some of those purposes should be part of different protocols and infrastructures custom-built from the ground-up.
Another compelling (and often-quoted) section of The Cathedral and the Bazaar is the discussion about debugging. Raymond says: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" and "Debugging is parallelizable." These assertions simply are not true and are distortions of how the development of fetchmail proceeded. It is true that many people, in parallel, looked for bugs and proposed fixes. But only one person (Raymond) actually made fixes, by incorporating the proposed changes into the official code base. Debugging (the process of fixing the program) was performed by one person, from suggestions made by many people. If Raymond had blindly applied all proposed code changes, without reading them and thinking about them, the result would have been chaos. A rare bug can be fixed completely in isolation, with no effect on the rest of the program.
The above quote from the article suggests that "debugging" consists essentially of making the code changes themselves. - WRONG!
The most excrutiatingly painful part of the "debugging" process is to actually find the bug, not necessarily and exclusively fixing it which I consider more like the fun part of the challenge. Well that can be inverted in some cases too...
Anyway, the Open Source model, with "many eyeballs" looking at the code, helps you FIND a lot more bugs than one person would, and identify the weaker areas of the code and architecture. Of course the code doesn't fix itself because a bunch of geeks looked at it, and the OpenSource concept never ever claimed to allow that, but it does allow a more thorough debugging process which will eventually make for stronger code.
One of my favorite Open Source projects is the Xalan XSL processor, which I believe is another marvelous example of the success of the Open Source concept. I have tested its compliance against W3C Standards by using a good 99% of XSL-T and XPath's features in some complex XSL-based applications I'm working on, and I can tell you this thing is rock-solid, which I find even more laudable as language processors are some of the more complex applications one can develop.
now THAT would be a rather dumb way to go: no way in hell this could be regulated: before you know it, all IP's WILL be owned by one or two telco giants and sold for prime $$$. This would essentially give a bigger share of the internet pie to people with more money than to people who actually wanna do something useful with them. I think they're right to scrutinize your plans before allocating you blocks of IP's.
IP addresses deal with the essential functionment of the internet, this CANNOT be taken lightly and certainly not put in the dirty hands of capitalism. It would like handing the internet over to a couple of corporations, which would, essentially, rule the world. It is absolutely vital that IP addresses allocations remain in the hands of an INDEPENDENT non-profit organization.
Domain names do not affect the way the internet works. There can always be a near infinite amount of domain names available. You can't compare auctioning domains and auctioning IP blocks, that's just crazy!@
The Matrix and EP1 were competing for the best special effects' Oscar.
Remember WHICH MOVIE got it?
The Matrix!
Try to imagine the slap in Mr. Lucas's face:
ILM had almost consistently been winning best visual effects Oscars over the last few years, and the very year his so highly anticipated movie comes out, with all its overhyped and highly bragged-about slew of ILM special effects, SOMEONE ELSE gets the title!
I think this should have taught George Lucas the lesson that visual effects DO NOT make a movie: as snazzy (not necessarily GOOD) as they can be, if your characters are not interesting enough for the moviegoer to care about them, they're as good as non-existent.
It appears He's not learning.
In any case, I ain't going thru
this sh*t again with my friends for EP2 .
I've read thru many technical replies on this subject, and I was very happy to read some really informative stuff. This discussion should encourage other countries to build stronger routes to other parts of the world, *not* because they are affraid the U.S. backbones will be shut down by the F.B.I., but because they owe it to themselves and the rest of the world to increase the performance and reliability of the internet. After all the whole point of the Internet was to have many different ways to route packets around the world, and although we already can, from what I've seen on the various posts, we sure could do it better. The original question of what would become of the internet without the United States backbones came from the recent litigations between the FBI and major ISP's (one of which I work for) about running Carnivore. So now here's my question: Why would any U.S. governmental agency do *anything* to significantly harm the internet in the U.S.? How dependent on the internet do you think the U.S. economy is? How do you think the U.S. population would react if they suddenly couldn't get their e-mail anymore? Do you think our economy and government would survive that? The Feds may threaten, prosecute, fine and make ISP's lives a hell, but in the end, a compromise *will* be found, and the show *will* go on, there is way too much at stake. And yes chances are those who don't know about encryption (PGP) will end up losing some level of privacy. But hey, while they're at it, the Feds should sift thru my snail mail, and to make the pill easier to swallow they should start a program called "wepayyourbills.fbi.gov", "'cuz we care about your business!"
Slashdot Mirror
1) The WAP protocol itself, with focus on the Wireless Markup Language
WAP is not a bad protocol, and I would add that it is a rather good protocol that meets the goals it was developed for:
- Limited Bandwidth
- Limited Screen Real Estate
The wireless markup language offers great flexibility to interface with phones with limited capabilities. I've been working with it ever since its creation and thru its (at times) painful evolution. Interacting with a phone is quite different from interacting with a desktop computer and a mouse, a lot of out-of-the-box thinking had to be put into the development of this markup language, how to go from one screen to another, how to loop thru all the links within a screen, the concepts of DECKS and CARDS that let you minimize useless downloads of information and optimize navigation, the various ways to send data to a server through different input mechanisms, user-input validation to minimize errors and downloads. If thoroughly thought-out, a wireless web application working with the WAP protocol can be a very useful tool for every day life.2) Why WAP phones? Why do less?
I personally, currently don't *need* to be surfing the whole entire web on my phone. Not right now. With work and personnal research I do from home and at my office, I already spend all the time I need using the Internet to its full potential. And I'd much rather like to be sitting comfortably in a chair at a desktop computer while I do all that.
When I'm on the move and/or going out with friends, I don't necessarily want to have a full-featured computer in the palm of my hand. Not worth the money, not worth the weight nor the size of an i-mode (I bought the Motorolla StarTAC for its compact size). I know it's tempting, I'm all for snazzy gadgets, I do have quite a few, but frankly, I don't need it right now.
However, I'd often be hanging out with friends and suddenly one of us would ask: "I wonder what's playing at the theaters located near the Derby, Hollywood, anyone up for a movie before going out dancing?". I get out my StarTAC Sprint PCS phone, connect, go straight to the wireless interface of my yahoo, go to movies, key in a zipcode, get a list of theaters in that area, pick one, see movies playing, pick one to get the times, and boom!: In a matter of a few seconds I get all the information I need. How's my EarthLink stock doing today? same thing -> my yahoo, stocks, select ELNK (which was part of my list of the portfolio I had set-up), see stocks details.
- The nice thing about WAP phones is that they don't allow SPAM!
- no ad banners
- no useless images
- clear, simple and well presented information: when you have such limited screen real-estate and bandwith, it FORCES web applications developers and interface designers to put a MUCH stronger emphasis on USABILITY, which a lot of web sites currently lack.
The above are my usual replies to the obvious question "why do less when you can do more?" Hopefuly, with much-needed healthy i-mode competition arising, the price of WAP phones and services will go down. There might still be a market for those phones catering to more low-end users, people like me maybe. I would expect i-modes to be a raging success among teens, who as everyone know, will LOVE to be connected ALL THE TIME and do all kinds of entertaining stuff on their gadget. i-mode also seems a much cheaper alternative to computers + internet connection. Some other people already get enough connectivity at work and at home and don't need additional entertainment on that but wouldn't mind a phone that gives them the option to look-up some very topical information every once in a while.3) The Real Issues / Why so much hate?
A lot of i-mode's hype among developers comes from the fact that "it does HTML!". Hurray, that means developers don't have to re-think nor re-do any of their site to cater to i-modes! Hey, being a developer myself and having dealt with quite a lot of markup languages I'm all for that too. Then I can't help but wonder: What would http://www.wired.com/, http://www.slashdot.org/, http://my.yahoo.com/ look like on an i-mode? How nicely do framesets render? What about ad banners? Does it handle complex nested tables? Then I read "well you should optimize your site to deliver 'compact HTML' or cHTML". Ok, now that makes a little more sense. You do need to rethink your site a little. At least you don't have to learn that very complex new markup language called WML, you might "waste" a whole half day of your life learning it. And the interface and site flow can pretty much remain the same! All valid reasons ...
b) Diagnosis ...
But I believe there is a much deeper issue that lurks around the corner when I look at the strong resistance from so many people to WML.
-> Change <-
A lot of people praise the i-mode because it is closer to already existing standards like HTML, thereby solving implementation nightmares. People will one day have to face the fact that HTML *might not* be THE answer to all web applications. Who knows what task-specific web-enabled devices will come out in the next few years? One can't guarantee HTML will the the appropriate markup language for all of them. I personally don't think i-mode and WAP phones are ready to compete on the exact same level because they don't necessarily serve the same purposes nor markets, yet I keep seeing people writing big controversies about "WAP vs i-mode". Over the last 5 years, a good part of the Internet community has learned to live with a now well-defined "vision" of the "The Web", with a well-defined set of protocols that are known and understood by all developers, and in the last year, with the demise of WAP, it has become a more popular belief that any "web-enabled" device should fit within that same original vision.
c) Solutions ... ?
People and developers will have to learn to live with the fact that new standards SHOULD and WILL arise, and that it's the only way we can build stronger, more user-oriented web applications. If we don't explore all options that are currently out there, how can we certify that our current standards are the best? "The Web" will evolve to serve a wider array of purposes, and it is not unreasonable to think that some of those purposes should be part of different protocols and infrastructures custom-built from the ground-up.
Another compelling (and often-quoted) section of The Cathedral and the Bazaar is the discussion about debugging. Raymond says: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" and "Debugging is parallelizable." These assertions simply are not true and are distortions of how the development of fetchmail proceeded. It is true that many people, in parallel, looked for bugs and proposed fixes. But only one person (Raymond) actually made fixes, by incorporating the proposed changes into the official code base. Debugging (the process of fixing the program) was performed by one person, from suggestions made by many people. If Raymond had blindly applied all proposed code changes, without reading them and thinking about them, the result would have been chaos. A rare bug can be fixed completely in isolation, with no effect on the rest of the program.
The above quote from the article suggests that "debugging" consists essentially of making the code changes themselves. - WRONG!
The most excrutiatingly painful part of the "debugging" process is to actually find the bug, not necessarily and exclusively fixing it which I consider more like the fun part of the challenge. Well that can be inverted in some cases too ...
Anyway, the Open Source model, with "many eyeballs" looking at the code, helps you FIND a lot more bugs than one person would, and identify the weaker areas of the code and architecture. Of course the code doesn't fix itself because a bunch of geeks looked at it, and the OpenSource concept never ever claimed to allow that, but it does allow a more thorough debugging process which will eventually make for stronger code.
One of my favorite Open Source projects is the Xalan XSL processor, which I believe is another marvelous example of the success of the Open Source concept. I have tested its compliance against W3C Standards by using a good 99% of XSL-T and XPath's features in some complex XSL-based applications I'm working on, and I can tell you this thing is rock-solid, which I find even more laudable as language processors are some of the more complex applications one can develop.
IP addresses deal with the essential functionment of the internet, this CANNOT be taken lightly and certainly not put in the dirty hands of capitalism. It would like handing the internet over to a couple of corporations, which would, essentially, rule the world. It is absolutely vital that IP addresses allocations remain in the hands of an INDEPENDENT non-profit organization.
Domain names do not affect the way the internet works. There can always be a near infinite amount of domain names available. You can't compare auctioning domains and auctioning IP blocks, that's just crazy!@
Remember WHICH MOVIE got it?
The Matrix!
Try to imagine the slap in Mr. Lucas's face: ILM had almost consistently been winning best visual effects Oscars over the last few years, and the very year his so highly anticipated movie comes out, with all its overhyped and highly bragged-about slew of ILM special effects, SOMEONE ELSE gets the title!
I think this should have taught George Lucas the lesson that visual effects DO NOT make a movie: as snazzy (not necessarily GOOD) as they can be, if your characters are not interesting enough for the moviegoer to care about them, they're as good as non-existent.
It appears He's not learning.
In any case, I ain't going thru this sh*t again with my friends for EP2 .
I've read thru many technical replies on this subject, and I was very happy to read some really informative stuff. This discussion should encourage other countries to build stronger routes to other parts of the world, *not* because they are affraid the U.S. backbones will be shut down by the F.B.I., but because they owe it to themselves and the rest of the world to increase the performance and reliability of the internet. After all the whole point of the Internet was to have many different ways to route packets around the world, and although we already can, from what I've seen on the various posts, we sure could do it better. The original question of what would become of the internet without the United States backbones came from the recent litigations between the FBI and major ISP's (one of which I work for) about running Carnivore. So now here's my question: Why would any U.S. governmental agency do *anything* to significantly harm the internet in the U.S.? How dependent on the internet do you think the U.S. economy is? How do you think the U.S. population would react if they suddenly couldn't get their e-mail anymore? Do you think our economy and government would survive that? The Feds may threaten, prosecute, fine and make ISP's lives a hell, but in the end, a compromise *will* be found, and the show *will* go on, there is way too much at stake. And yes chances are those who don't know about encryption (PGP) will end up losing some level of privacy. But hey, while they're at it, the Feds should sift thru my snail mail, and to make the pill easier to swallow they should start a program called "wepayyourbills.fbi.gov", "'cuz we care about your business!"