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WAP Forum Adopts XHTML For WAP 2.0 62

Posted by CmdrTaco from the ever-changing-specifications dept.
earache writes: "This story at Infoworld.com talks about how the WAP forum is moving away from WML and adopting XHTML as the markup of choice for WAP 2.0."
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WAP Forum adopts XHTML for WAP 2.0 More

WAP Forum adopts XHTML for WAP 2.0

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  • You are wrong, but not totally. Stay worried for these reasons:

    1. There are a ferkload of phones out there. The reason Phone.com has such a high market cap is that the number of cell phones totally swamps the number of computers with Internet connections. Phones do have the potential to change the direction of the Internet.

    2. Intelligence and law enforcement authorities have a longstanding and cozy relationship with telcos. The more cleartext, tracking, and unencrypted voice, the better Big Brother knows what the people, in aggregate and in particular, are doing.

    3. Carriers, for the most part, loathe flat-rate pricing. I could write a book on why but the basic reasons are pretty obvious.

    4. Content publishers want total control, and phone-based access is an opportunity to get and keep control forever. They can bill you item by item, control the device you play/read your content on, and they know exactly what you do with it and for how long. Makes my skin crawl, but the MPAA/RIAA/TimwarnerAOLMSNBCCBSCNN love this s--t.

    So, while I believe Internet standards and business models will prevail, there are a lot of vested interests working against this outcome.

  • Actually, yes, it's big news that it's going to use TCP instead of UDP, at least in the mobile telephony space.

    Politically, Phone.com (the original developer of WAP) has very much wanted to keep WAP 2.0 on UDP; the various p.c browsers don't generalize well to TCP. Meanwhile, there are other micro-browsers out there which handle XHTML and HTML over TCP/IP on phones as well as handling WAP over UDP/IP; p.c doesn't want to lose market share to them.

    From a user perspective, if your phone supports TCP/IP as well as UDP/IP, then protocols like SMTP, POP3 and IMAP4 are available directly from the phone. Users don't need to go through the carrier's WAP gateway and read mail in the browser. You can see why that's convenient.

    So, yes, it's a big deal, both to the people in the industry, and to the users of the phones.
  • Welcome to 'vertical diversification', the hyper-corps get all the way up and down the food chain ... the access provider is the content provider

  • The bandwidth with 802.11 isn't the issue, the point is, you _can't_ have more then like 20 people connect to an airport, it's just not possible (regardless of the bandwidth everyone is using).
  • Has Microsoft ever produced a real open standard? Of course not. There are de facto standards like Word DOC which nobody outside MS is happy about. Not even people who use Microsoft products all the time are happy; they know the pain of enforced upgrades all too well... The rest of us are irritated by the fact that we can't read it. They tried to make another "standard" for virtual private networks called PPTP, but we all know that one doesn't hold water. All this aside, Microsoft's business is not about creating standards, it's based on embrace and extend: taking what standards it can get and then perverting them so that nobody else can use them. They were all set to take over HTML when they started shipping Internet Exploiter with Win95, but fortunately for us Mozilla and the antitrust suit intervened. They also tried the same with Java but their court battle with Sun ended that one as well...

  • If they're going back to TCP/IP and xHTML, then WAP is plainly and simply dead, dead, dead.

    I never liked WML much, but WSP/WTP and WTLS are pretty good at handling high-latency, intermittent connections. This is something TCP/IP and SSL don't do well. If what was quoted is true, then I think they are thowing the baby out with the bathwater.


    Remember the famous last words of Socrates, "I drank what?"

  • Technology being replaced, What a new concept. ;)
    Of course WAP is going to be replaced when we have Broadband wireless, but unless you have the trillions of dollars and a million men to update all the basestations, and backbone network to support it, its not going to be overnight.

    People expect TOO much too quickly. If you remember a few years ago.
    People using 2400 baud modems, to connect to BBS's. Technology replaced the BBS's and modems with High Speed Internet Connection and Webservers.

    WAP is a toy? I disagree again.
    Just cause the basic content is fluff, doesnt make it a toy.
    Some of the more "business apps" ive seen are Delivery services, Public Safety, Work Order systems, Ticketing systems, Instant Messaging, Commerce, and on and on...

    IMHO - Brook Harty

  • Yes, HTML4.01+ is dead. There will be no HTML 5. It will be XHTML 1.0 (well formed XMLised HTML).

    What, are you still reading this?

  • If you do not have useful thing to do with WAP then there is problem with hmm... lets say your local banks and other co's who's services you have to use on daily bases etc. Because over here "big" Co. take WAP kind'a seriously and thanks for that i can read news, e-mails, check stock quotes + real time charts. also transfer funds and pay my bills ... if this is useless - what is useful ?
  • Hey! Thanks for adding to the knowledge here. My experience is in converged communications, where equipment makers are promising carriers that they will make a lot of money by being able to charge extra for all kinds of stuff ("differntiated services"). Might happen for some really high value apps, but basically the gear makers are telling their customers what they want to hear. What will really happen is that multimedia downloads will create a market for off-peak bandwidth and carriers will use those fancy QoS-capable routers to auction off the cheapest bandwidth, and not to charge more for whatever the current "high value" fantasy is.

    I also agree that CDPD and/or 2.5G stuff that is TCP/IP and Internet oriented is the way things are going to happen, and some carriers and net gear makers see that fact. Look at what Bluetooth implies: a tiny phone that links to your PDA that runs a real browser on a large-enough screen that you can really surf normal Web sites, with, perhaps, some trouble on sites that won't fit in a 300-400 pixels wide screen (turning a handheld on its side).

    Good for you that you demand warrants. I know of carriers that are quite the LEA lapdogs.

  • Actually, I work at the largest CDPD telco in the usa. Thought ID add some info to your post.

    1. All the CDPD phones do have an IP address, and does have a TCP/IP stack.
    2. Big Brother doesnt have a Cozy relationship at all, we demand warrents and only after legal says ok, do we release information. (IF we log it!)
    3. CDPD is flat fee now, and the basic service is free.
    4. True true, Marketing loves to spoon feed you, but it pays the bills.

  • The Internet protocols are currently being redesigned for deployment in space. TCP/IP doesn't handle intermittent connections or long delays well enough. See this article [techweb.com] where the father of the Internet, Vince Cert, says "TCP/IP (is not) an attractive option." The WAP protocols do handle these issues quite well, however.

    BTW - Where did you get your space TCP/IP info? The Betamax manuals..? ;-)


    Remember the famous last words of Socrates, "I drank what?"

  • Moderators, please mark this one up, This is SOO true. But there is pr0n out there. ;) 1 bit bitmaps and scrolling.
  • From a user perspective, if your phone supports TCP/IP as well as UDP/IP, then protocols like SMTP, POP3 and IMAP4 are available directly from the phone. Users don't need to go through the carrier's WAP gateway and read mail in the browser. You can see why that's convenient.

    This is what I'm saying for years. Once the froth settles down, the market is not going to accept phones which offer a restricted service for which you have have to pay a premium over the unrestricted equivalent. It's like paying extra to peer through the letterbox in a glass door.

    If phones which offer TCP/IP to the device are available in the same market as phones which offer WAP to the device, the WAP phones will die -- they cannot possibly succeed. Phones which offer TCP/IP to the phone are available, therefore WAP will die.

  • Why did the WAP forum want the poor developers to learn a further language? I have no idea. The technologies designed by the W3C are good enough for cellular phones. CSS (for example) offers a posibility to write Stylesheets for cellular phones. Switching from WML to XHTML is a good decision, but I thing the WAP-Forum would do well using XHTML from the beginning on.
  • 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.

  • Every member of the WAP forum and especially phone.com folks should be lined up against a wall a shot for crimes against the net..

    For the love of "standards", first it was HDML, then WML, and now finally they decide to go with real open standards.

    You know, you just can't download a new browser to your phone. You're stuck with it. There are still phones being sold today that have the UP.Browser 3.0 in them which only supports HDML. Then there's UP.Browser 3.1 which has some support for WML and UP.Browser 4.0 which I'm not even sure any phones have that one in it yet.

    So now we are finally going to go with XHTML and all us sorry web developers who try to hack together a page that supports WAP devices have to develop the same content for even more languages.

    It's just frustration, that's all. For example, Apache has nice content-negotiation features but they are all but useless because every browser has to advertise that it can handle everything. My Motorola 7868W when hitting web sites via the verizon wap gateway, sends out an Accept: string that includes text/html as accepted with no quality value associated with it, as in "I prefer X-HDML or WML but I'll take text/html if you have absolutely nothing else."

    No, can't do that I guess. So one has to hack together a script to parse the browser string for UP.browser, get the correct version number out of it, then decide on your own what content to serve the browser....

    Such simple ideas that would make the world a better place interopably and they are never done.

    For example, for chrissakes, damn Internet Explorer still says it's Mozilla... And they ALL say they accept */* with no q= qualifier... :(

  • Okay, a couple of points - in the UK we consistently get up to 800m with a 100mW output power with an 11Mb Symbol [symbol.com] set, and considerably more than that with the US's 1W limit. This isn't that bad.

    Also - If you need more than 20 concurrent users in one area you can place more than one Access Point at each site. I know the Airport is not quite as intelligent as the Symbol kit, but it still copes okay with this setup.

    I still think that unless we go for a realistic picocell environment across the whole country then it is pointless to replace the current GSM setup - although I do want my Symbol 1740 Palm device with laser scanner and 802.11 with telnet + html browser apps to work everywhere...:)


    Frog51
  • Yes, WML will probably die because of compatibility and presentation limitations, but not WAP, despite what many are saying here with 3G, UMTS, TCP inside WAP, etc. I see WAP with 3 main advantages: 1) data integrity 2) security 3) *speed* Let's you are in the middle of a secure wireless transaction, using TCP and SSL and your cell coverage temporarily goes out of range or your device is passed from one cell tower to the next. You could drop your data. WSP, WTP, WDP, WTLS inside of WAP were made to handle intermittent connections and recover from these situations where there can be errors and dropped packets. The wired network is much more reliable and redundant in this regard and TCP, HTTP are well suited for that specifically. There are multiple levels of security built-in to WAP, aside from application (depends on developer)or data link layer (depends on mobile operator), including SIM/WIM cards, WTLS, wireless digital certificates, PKI cryptography for wireless networks, etc. SIM/WIM's not only ensures who you are over the network (I don't think this level of security is available in current HTTP), but you can swap them between phones and also reduce the risk of somebody hijacking your account. Good WAP Gatway/Proxies also maintain security at the levels of user, session, source IP, and destination IP. 3G, including UMTS are just faster networks which WAP can sit on top of. Sure, the new networks will be 100 times faster and can do full multimedia, but WAP compresses data (I've seen 3 to 4 times smaller) so that it is even faster. WAP gateway/proxies can cache data too, whereas not as much HTTP traffic passes through a proxy. Even if you had 100Mbps wireless on 4G, it is undeniable that people will *always* want and need more speed. It reminds of something a young man once said about memory required in PC's: "640K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates, 1981
  • Thank God for that. I was wondering how long it would take them to catch on to the fact that creating a markup "standard" that doesn't have a one-to-one translation to XHTML/HTML is a Bad Idea.
    So basically, we can never have a markup standard that does anything else than exactly what XHTML and HTML can do -- and that means, never any other standard.
  • Me too, but the point is that I don't want my mobile phone to be any bigger than it currently is (I've got a Nokia 3210), in fact, I would like it to shrink even further, but I still like it to be able to read web pages, and the fact is that HTML is suited for the purpose. It's called graceful degradation, and it is all very nicely put in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines [w3.org]. When you can have both, why settle for less?

  • Remove WML? Naah. (Score:4)

    by Palainen ( 84759 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @09:27AM (#774487) Homepage
    Whoever wrote this at InfoWorld clearly wasn't at the WAP Forum. The consensus has been for over a year to get rid of all the stuff that was reinvented and use standards instead where appropriate; examples of this include replacing the WSP/WTP/WDP stack with wTCP. But this is the first I have ever seen about replacing WML, and I am very sceptical that it will happen in WAP 2.0.

    Sure, there has been workshops on XHTML regularly at the Forum, and there's lots of interesting discussion, but give me a draft spec and some rally around it, and then I'll start believing it's going to happen.

    Right now I don't. Not for WAP-NG, anyway (commonly branded WAP 2.0, although that version number decision lies with a committee).

    There's tons of different interests trying to rubberstamp lots of different technologies as part of WAP. This is half politics, half paperwork diving, and 10% technology. Over 600 member companies are trying to further their own business interests by influencing the WAP Forum. The result can only be described as... well, look at any parliament and you'll see the same effect in operation.

    XHTML may be interesting for now, but WAP-NG is going to throw away the reinvention and stick to standards where available, not add new unknowns.
  • This may be true in itself, but where's the relevance? Microsoft has stuck 100% true to the published WAP specs, both in WAP 1.1 products such as Mobile Information Server and Mobile Explorer, and to the published WAP June 2000 Conformance Release in upcoming products such as the Pocket Internet Explorer.

    And what does WAP have to do with Microsoft-produced standards, anyway? Except that they're one of some 600 member companies, with one vote out of six hundred?

  • WAP is cureently mostly a toy (Score:3)

    by Cmdr. Marille ( 189584 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @08:16AM (#774489)
    so this is certainly a very important step to integrate mobile devices which have some kind of "internet connectivity" with the rest of the online community Until now wap seemed to me like more or less useless but hip thing. Were I live (Austria) all 4 major mobile phone providers are allready offering confentional wap service(portals, the ability to read news horoscopes and such, integration with outlook, etc.) but still i haven't seen one application which made me think: "hmm, This could actually be useful. Of course it would be nice to read e-mails "on the run" but for those purposes i would use something like the nokia communicator or my notebook. It's just *painfull* to read a e-mail on a cell phone display. Also the 9600 baud which gsm offers right now aren't exactly what i imagine(even though 9600 are certainly enough for telent and such) for real mobile internetaccess. GPRS and finally UMTS(when i finally becomes a useable technology(which some people like Nicolas Negroponte doubt) will hopefully solve this problem. My personal opinion is that WAP will not only be moving toward "normal* internet standards but will become obsolete once bandwith and mobile devices will allow users to just mobile connect to "the internet", maybe with small modifications(screen sizes for websites and such) but still without a seperate protocol like WAP.
  • Yes you pretty much answered my questions about
    censorship, but the number of mobile networks is
    limited, so there is no guarantee that options
    will be available.

    The reason it might impact the WWW of today is that there is less incentive to make devices that use it. Let's say you have the choice of a $1500 device for free access and crappy content and a $1 device with OK and very hyped information services which costs money...what will consumers choose? Will the internet be reduced to a geek thing?

    Most .com companies are apparently loosing money, why do you think the status quoe will prevail? Or is the trend in mobile services just a preview of what's to come on the net.

    1. WML is not a W3C Recommendation.
    2. HDML is dead. In fact, it wasn't even born... :-)
    3. I never liked HTML (though I insist that if you write HTML, you write it properly, that is, structure only), it has a few serious flaws, one of them is the insistence on the big difference block-level vs. inline-level elements.
    4. XML is the only ML you need. XHTML is a XML application (HTML is dead, in the sense that 4.01 is likely to be the last HTML Recommendation), so is WML, and tons of others MLs. They are also just XML applications.
  • that "FIVELA" is actually a SIXLA, while "SIXLA" is technically a FIVELA.
  • Dont forget WML+ ;)
    Also HDML is dead, but people are still using it.
  • So it looks like WAP will move definition from Wait And Pay to
    What ? Another protocol ?

  • This makes place for the real WML [engelschall.com]!
  • Congratz. I have been working for a WAP/WML Company [wirelessinfotech.com] for a while. One of the stumbling blocks of WAP was the restrictions WML imposed on style and compatiblity. Hopefully by moving to XHTML we would have a much more standard way of describing information to wireless devices and reduce the time needed for messy wireless hack jobs. And also this paves the way for WAP to become the defacto standard world wide. I now have more condifence in WAP than i-mode (we were looking into i-mode due to the limitations of WML).
    --
  • Hey,

    If you ask me, the reason WAP hasn't really taken off is because the screen is too small to look at Pr0n on. I mean, it's like an inch wide, nowhere near big enough for proper 'browsing'...

    Michael

    ...another comment from Michael Tandy.

  • Don't want to nitpick but:

    If the range of 802.11 is 200ft then that would imply having towers every 400ft, I will admit to being particularly clued up on 802.11, however I assume it does not have a particularly efficient frequency reuse scheme, that would preclude it from being used as a pervasive carrier.

    Did you know that that GSM compresses it's speech to about 12Kbps, with 11Mpbs that's about 916 users talking.

    GPRS at the moment can manage ~30Kbps thats 366 users. While it can theoretically get up to 100kbps this is going to be very unlikely in practice.

    UMTS I believe will try and offer 2Mbps per user. But this will only be in densely populated areas and picocells. 802.11 will likely be a real competitor in the picocell market, although the average user won't notice because by then a mobile handset will likely be compatible with every wireless service out there, such that you use what ever is quickest at the time, and the all the billing will be integrated behind the scenes.

  • Re:Is this good? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If they say, "Yes, you will only be able to access the sites we have bookmarked for you," take your money elsewhere. They are in the business of making money, and money doesn't grow on trees, it comes from your pocket.

    This assumes that most people aren't idiots who don't care. If most customers don't express a preference (and they won't unless organized), censors will outcompete and destroy free providers, and you will be stuck with the bad choice your clueless fellow customers made for you.

    What's needed is an email petition perhaps - "why British Telecom wants to control what YOU can read."

  • WAP is mainly just a toy, as you say, but there are some fun/useful applications - getting stock quotes is useful, and well suited to WAP.

    On the fun side, I am quite addicted to the fortune service from Excite's WAP site (sample: 'you have a talent for talking to weirdos').

    So far, that's it - for me the killer app on my mobile phone (Nokia 7110) is the SMS - it has T9 predictive input to cut down on button presses, and I can use an SMS to email gateway to send short emails directly from the phone, without a lengthy WAP login sequence. There's also a gateway from email to SMS but that seems overloaded.

    Of course, these email applications are not provided by my mobile service provider (Orange), who are reassuringly clueless and don't even have a suggestion box on their WAP site that I can see. All the more argument for opening up WAP services - walled gardens are only good if you have very talented gardeners, so let's open up WAP with more commonly adopted standards and direct-to-phone protocols.

  • Re:Walled Garden? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The access provider billing for content? Screw 'em. I want the provider to bill me for bandwidth and not a single other thing. I'll interact seperately with a content provider; this is none of an access provider's business.
  • What's needed is an email petition perhaps - "why British Telecom wants to control what YOU can read."

    And the answer is; to make money. And they want to take your money without you feeling ripped off, so they make most services not that expensive. But they make others incredibly expensive. Premium services. Of course, for this subsidization to work, they'll have to block competing wapsites that offer the premium info for free. (Example; news from cnn is a premium service on NL KPN's minfo wap service, but cnn.com can be accessed by wap for free using any other network provider's wap service)

    And like the fools they are, yes, most consumers will say "hey, how often do I need those premium services anyway, so what if they block a load of sites?".
    --

  • This change still seems dumb.

    The purpose of deveoping XML is to separate the presentation (art work) by using XSL files for style definition and putting just data in the XML files.

    By using good XML schemas and pushing all the design elements to a designer-maintained style sheet (XSL) it makes it easy for programmers to write scripts/programs that can easily dynamically generate XML documents without the messiness of HTML.

    XHTML and WML work against the spirit of XML (even though they are instances of XML) by putting style elements within the XML document.

    This offers nearly no benefit for the programmer. It's a complete hose!

  • I wonder if RealDoll will make me a 10-year-old girl?

  • I've been playing with XHTML recently. I found a program (the W3C's HTML Tidy program) that will take normal HTML and convert it automatically to XHTML.

    Once you have a webpage in XHTML, you can use all the XML tools on it. For instance, I converted Google search results to XHTML, then used an XSLT stylesheet to convert the result summaries to a RSS file suitable for syndication.

    I didn't have to write perl, or compile anything for this to work - it was all done using stylesheets and Tidy.

    What's the point of this? I don't know yet - but I am thinking of lots of useful stuff it could be used for. Imagine a site like Slashdot automatically inserting a box of relevent google search results next to every story - no more excuses for not doing research on a story.

    There's huge possibilities out there.

  • Are they finally going to stop replacing tried and tested protocols and data formats with thier own cheesy alternatives?

  • I have to disagree with this. Certainly WAP isn't a substitue for the web, but services tailored for WAP are useful (if in short supply)
    eg.
    • Yahoo's services are now WAP enabled. So I can check my mail, check weather reports, stocks etc. I appreciate that reading mail is not easy, but it's nice to be able to check whether you've received an important mail. I'd prefer to have difficulty reading it than not to even know of its existance.
    • Multimap's WAP site gives you street by street directions between postcodes (only tried it in London). Excellent for when I don't have my A-Z. Note that this is text only - no graphics.
    • Railtrack's WAP site gives you timetables for train services. Enter your starting station and end station, and you get the next service available, together with earlier/later options. You don't even need to enter the full names of the stations. It'll work it out and present you with options.
    • The CurryNet site will give you curry houses in your postcode, with nearby taxi firms, tube stops etc. Useful with site #2 above. Usually by this stage I'm in no state to operate the phone though :-(
    • My own consultancy WAP site http://www.oops.demon.co.uk/wap/index.wml ! Did I hear 'bandwagon' ?
  • But with meaning.
    What I don't understand is why wireless technologies keep going for new standards. If wireless providers are moving towards PCS (requiring a tower every 1 1/2 miles or so), why don't they just adopt 802.11 for their devices, and get 11 Mps throughput? That sure beats trying to cram everything into a new standard for people to have to adopt.
  • Now only if the dtd's are kept nice an non-proprietary we might have something.
  • Now people are just going to have to follow standards (which hasn't been happening).

  • Finally. (Score:1)

    by BJH ( 11355 )
    Thank God for that. I was wondering how long it would take them to catch on to the fact that creating a markup "standard" that doesn't have a one-to-one translation to XHTML/HTML is a Bad Idea...

  • WAP: YATB Yet Another TLA Buzzword (Score:3)

    by Gregoyle ( 122532 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @08:02AM (#774512)
    Buzz buzz...

    "We welcome 3G". How much ya wanna bet this guy doesn't even know what 3G stands for, much less what 2G and 1G even were. These buzzwords are starting to give me headaches. I think that marketing drones are under the assumption that as soon as you give something a TLA (Three Letter Acronym) it becomes significant.

    I'm sure the new WAP is going to be useful, but come on, is it really news that it should use TCP? The XHTML stuff seems cool though, it'd be good to have a lingua franca. (See, even I'm doing it; at some sub-concious level, I give XHTML more credibility because it's a FIVLA).

  • AFAIK, W3C has got a "TM" on XHTML, I don't know if that should ensure it.

  • Walled Garden? (Score:3)

    by crisco ( 4669 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @08:30AM (#774514) Homepage
    They want to limit what you can connect to and view with your 'web enababled' phone

    However, BTCellnet's Short said there are some practical reasons for taking this "walled garden" approach. That approach makes it easier to ensure security, control spam e-mail, carry out billing, and account for use of the content provided, Short said.

    Security is achieved through the right measures in the first place, not by limiting what the client can access. Spam control has nothing to do with limiting the phone to a few selcet information portals. Billing should be easy at the outrageous charges that exist, even if they switch to a bandwidth based instead of time based billing system. Billing for content use is a revenue model that has already proved unacceptable for general internet users, what makes them think it is going to work here.

    At least they gained a clue regarding WAP vs XHTML.

    I guess I'll buy one when it works right, not how they want it to work.

  • Of course, it'd be a lot better if everyone would sprinkle their <acronym title="eXtended HyperText Markup Language">XHTML</acronym>-code with <acronym> and <abbrev title="abbrevation"><abbrev></abbrev> in a way that should be quite self-explanatory from the use meta-use above. Those tags are, if I'm not all wrong, mandatory to pass Bobby-certification. Too bad no (?) graphical browsers support them in a sensible manner.

  • For my money (Score:3)

    by joshv ( 13017 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @07:57AM (#774516)
    The only device I will find usable will be one that has enough color depth and pixel resolution to display normal HTML pages. Heck, the palm pilot does a pretty good job with simple HTML right now.

    Work on getting good displays and good bandwith into these devices, not devising dumbed down standards that make an attempt at allowing you to order books in a 50x60 pixel display.

    -josh

  • Re:Almost First! (Score:3)

    by RJ11 ( 17321 ) <serge@guanotronic.com> on Saturday September 16, 2000 @08:04AM (#774517) Homepage
    The range for 802.11 is about 200 ft, maximum. And not only would it be expensive to put a tower every 200 feet, they'd then need it to do VoIP (and I'm not sure how much bandwidth this would use). Then you have to figure the number of people using each tower. I know at LWCE they had about 50 people all pushing the Apple Airport, which was way too many. You'd need a tower for about every 2 dozen people tops, with less than 200 feet between towers. It's not worth it to use 802.11, as you can clearly see.
  • It seems like all the phone companies are really running wild about the new possibilities with 3rd generation mobile voice + data transfer, aka UMTS. All the prototype devices i've seen so far seem to feature full-fledged WWW access, color screens etc. Who needs WAP anymore as soon as the first real UMTS apps are out? I think WAP needs another year or two to advance from its current state as an overpriced toy, and by then UMTS will be up and running and WAP will seem really obsolete
  • What phone compaies need to make is a sharp screen so you can display text on. Get one of those screens that are on digital cameras and put it on a cell phone.

  • The only device I will find usable will be one that has enough color depth and pixel resolution to display normal HTML pages.

    I disagree. I would really love to be able to browse web pages at 50x60 pixel display. In fact, I have hacked up something to enable me to retrieve web pages using e-mail and SMS to my mobile phone. It sucks, but the reason it sucks is the extremely poor coding of HTML people do. If people had coded good HTML, seperated style from content, we would never have seen this WAP rubbish and we would have had full access to the web on mobile phones by now. We wouldn't have gotten all the images, but while a picture may say as much as a thousand words, it certainly takes up a whole lot more space... (somebody smart once said) :-)

  • Re:Is this good? (Score:3)

    by A Big Gnu Thrush ( 12795 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @08:39AM (#774521)
    please tell me that I'm totally wrong.

    You're totally wrong.

    How will mobile services impact "the entire WWW"? What does censorship have to do with it?

    The article mentions that some providers limit what users can access. Not all do. If you are in the market for a WAP phone, ask the provider. If they say, "Yes, you will only be able to access the sites we have bookmarked for you," take your money elsewhere. They are in the business of making money, and money doesn't grow on trees, it comes from your pocket.

  • All the telcos use Phone.com's Uplink gateway. The feature set is more than just Email, its Content conversion, Alert functions, DB structure, High Avaliablity, Billing, PIM/SYNC, etc.. And yes its Email isnt bad either.

    But its not the Gateway software that gets the phone on the network, its the MDIS (Mobile Data Intermediate server) that allows SMS/CDPD devices (aka phones).

    Then you can use freeware SMS gateways (check www.freshmeat.com)

  • I think with the direction mobile services is going the entire WWW will slowly become proprietory with pay per view and cencorship. The entire net will be like those damned Ringtone and Logo services....please tell me that I'm totally wrong.
  • Wrong. Most of the current applications are, by
    a very strict sense, useless.

    But not all of them. To site one pretty nice
    example of what a creative use of wap can do, i
    will post a text from the wap faq (http://allnetdevices.com/faq/):

    "A good example of this, is a service that displays the location of different types of public transport in a city. Let's say you're running to the bus stop, late for a meeting, and since buses are never on time, you need to find out if the bus has just left the stop, or is just ten minutes late.

    At the bus stop there's usually a time table, but this one has a unique number printed on it. You access the public transportation site, and key in the number. The web server at the other end then knows exactly where you are, and can display the location of the nearest bus since the bus has a GPS system on board. Here in Oslo, the capital of Norway, we have, in addition to buses, subway, trams and trains. The buses do currently not have GSP on board, but some of the trams have. The subway and the trains do not, but their locations are known via the subway and train control centre. In short, this system can be enabled today without having to wait for any new technology. "

    Cant wait till gps is integrated on cell fones.
    Of course, that can raise security/privacy issues
    but there are plenty more great uses for wap once
    the user can be located (if he wants to).
  • moot point.
    Only the basic/free service is in the "Walled Garden".
    Pay the 10 bux and get unlimited account.
  • People will have stop thinking WAP as wireless Internet. It was never meant to be that, although the marketdroids did make those promises (and shot themselves in the foot). WAP could be very usefull for checking timetables, doing phonenumber lookups and such. Seeking information, not looking for pr0n.

    As for M-Commerce.. Well, I agree I wouldn't want use a phone for browsing a book listing (especially at those prices). But what if you see an advertisment for something (a book will be a fine example) while walking to work. The ad has a little barcode*, your phone has a barcode scanner. Just scan the code, the phone connects and retrieves addtional info (price being the most important one) and asks an if you want to buy the book. You ansver yes and the phone automatically places an order which will be delivered in couple of days. You hardly need 1024x768 display for that.

    *or a bluetooth chip or something.

    --

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