WAP Under Fire

Recently WAP ^[?] has come under serious criticism from a wide variety of places... Angus wrote a short piece saying that it'll be replaced. IcesTorm-I sent us an message on an IETF mailing list criticizing the format, and to suggesting that we use open formats like LEAP instead. Even Microsoft rejects the standard. Slashdot has supported WAP (well, kinda anyway) since I got bored a few months ago and slapped it together, and I'd tend to agree that its a crappy standard, but more due to the limitations of the devices that use it. (note: if anyone has a PDA format they're dying for on Slashdot, Send diffs -- not requests! We're working on some PDA formats, but there are only so many hours in the day, and we don't have devices that can do most of the formats users email me asking for). [Updated 7 July 18:25 GMT by timothy] Readers may also be interested in a WAP report prepared by Rohit Khare for 4K Associates, which is probably the most incisive (and one of the most critical) analyses on the topic to be had anywhere.

Do you really mean WAP?

One of the problems here is that people are confusing WAP, WML, and HDML. 99% of the time, people say "WAP" when what they really mean is "HDML" or "WML".

WAP is the protocol equivalent to HTTP. WML and HDML are the equivalent of HTML. When most people say their Web sites are "WAP compatible", what they mean to say is that they serve up "WML or HDML formatted content."

For instance, does Slashdot REALLY run a WAP server/gateway, or do they just have some of their content in HDML (or WML) format, a la the RSS version?

Most content providers could care less about (and don't need to care about) WAP. It's not their problem. The cell phone manufacturers and the PCS service providers are the only people that have to care because they have the only devices that need to talk "WAP". Everything else is just gatewayed HTTP requests for WML or HDML content.

So what is it that people are really complaining about? WAP or WML?

Re:Brain dead on delivery

I find it very interesting to see all these Americans who don't get mobile technology.

Not only is wireless net access using mobile devices a very good idea, it has taken off in a big way in Japan (although not, in fact, using WAP, but another mechanism).

Given that SMS has also taken off, there seems to be a very strong demand for delivery of salient text onto a small mobile device. I see no reason at this level why WAP (or similar) won't be successful.

Re:Could someone explain the benefits of WAP?!?

Someone please help me understand what all the fuss is all about? I want to jump on the bandwagon as well :-)

No, no. You want to jump OFF the bandwagon.

Well suited to the job at hand

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 [wapwarp.com] and a wap developers mailing list http://www.wap-dev.net [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.


"Give the anarchist a cigarette"

WAP and LEAP

Ok, lets face facts here.
LEAP has some major advantages over WAP. It's faster, it isn't encumbered with expensive patented stuff, and its endorsed by the Internet Standards community. however, it is not here.

LEAP does not even have a foothold in the market; it is still on the drawing board. In contrast, the major Mobile Phone manufacturers like Nokia are directly benefitting from their membership of the WAP consortium; most mobile phone networks now support WAP servers directly licenced from that consortium at extortionate rates, have farmed out WAP-enabled handsets to their customers, and are now supporting the service. How do we get the manufacturers that are *directly* benefitting from WAP to support LEAP? how do we get the networks to set up and support LEAP when they are already set up for and supporting WAP?
--

WAP senarios

I have studied on WAP at work for a month. Here's what I find:

Dispise the fact that WAP protocol has a lot of problems others listed, telco have no time to wait to push the products into the market. It's the next piece of pie to fight for.

A WAP phone is not used like your netscape on a PC. But it is useful for circumstances where you don't have a PC or a palm with you. For instance, if you have a WAP enabled wrist watch, you can set it to alert you when something important happens. The one I'm working on is the fileangel project at www.fileangel.org which will let you choose to be contacted when something happens to your file via a WAP device. Another example is that you can set up your program to call you on your WAP phone when your stock price is at a certain level and prompt you to buy/sell. It can prompt you to read an email when a certain important email is recieved. These things are related to real-time communication applications. I feel that it is quite useful.

As of whether WAP is a temporary technology, it depends. Sure, displays are getting better, CPUs are getting smaller and less power consuming, but things are shrinking at the same rate. For example, maybe one day we will be able to carry a watch, or a pen, which acts as a phone, pager, emailer, voice recognizer, digital camera, scanner, GPS and mp3 player ALL at once.

Or maybe one day we will stick this wearable screen on top of one eye and get all of the previoes example's features, plus a full-size, see-thru screen. (How ever playing movies out of our penny sized CD storage?)

The point is, there is no end to our need for smaller, more powerful devices. There is a chance that WAP may survive.

Of course! It's the acronym.

I believe that all doomed projects are a direct result of sucky acronyms. WAP is no exception. First off, it sounds like the sound a large rubber fish makes when slammed against the wall. Whap! Secondly, it's too open to defacement. Just off the top of my head, I can think of "Wimpy Application Performance" and "What A Putz!"

Think about more successful acronyms, like GNU. I challenge anyone to think of either a funny new definition _or_ a perverse way of pronouncing it. QED.

What's wrong with WAP? Here ya go.

A good article [freeprotocols.org] on the problems of WAP protocols and formats has been on freeprotocols.org [freeprotocols.org] for quite some time. I suggest anyone interested read this article for a really good understanding of the issues involved.

parse HTML instead

Asking content-providers to support a whole new protocol just for certain devices is the wrong approach. The right approach is to intelligently parse normal HTML and try to format it for the specific needs of the device, or ignore elements that can't be rendered on the device. For example, AvantGo [avantgo.com] does this for the Palm devices and other handhelds. It can automatically strip out images and tables (depending on setup). Web page designers can put in a meta tag [avantgo.com] "HandheldFriendly" to tell AvantGo to leave the tables in because they are designed to look ok on the Palm. This is pretty convenient, and I've used it successfully with some of my own dynamically generated pages.

Re:Well suited to the job at hand

You're confusing the protocol WAP with the markup language WML. Most of the criticism in the story is about WAP, though there are also problems with WML. Given that Japanese DoCoMo mobiles can already present limited HTML content meaningfully, and have bigger screens and much better market penetration than WML phones anywhere, it seems to be that no good justification exists for WML's pandering to small screen size and assumptions about presentation. Location based services, and web pages integration phone functionality sound like things that could be integrated into the existing scheme of URLs and emphatically don't require a redesign from scratch of the whole protocol suite and a brand new markup language.

As the IETF paper points out, WAP itself (as opposed to WML) seems primarily to be marketing construct rather than a protocol with any significan technical benefits. It especially concerns me that some mobile phone operators will probably use the protocol diconnect between their own services and the real internet to act as "portals" and try to promote a closed content model rather than the traditionally open one of the internet.

NOT an IETF document

There is NO IETF document on WAP. The link provided is a document submitted to the IETF mailing list (wich caused a lot of discussion on that list), but is not the work of a working group or any body within the IETF.

The problem that most people have on that list is the advertising. WAP phones are generaly advertized as "mobile internet" which is offcource false. WAP does not provide a IP layer it only provides limited proxied access to one of the many applications running on the Internet.