WAP Takes a Pounding
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WAP as a Rogue Project
Members of the World Wide Web Consortium have accused Phone.com and the WAP Forum it helped found with Nokia, Ericsson, and Motorola of not cooperating with the W3C. During a panel at last week's WWW9 conference, one panelist accused the WAP Forum of creating a separate "WML ghetto," when working within XML and XHTML might have created a more unified system.
Murray Maloney, a W3C member who helped push the SGML's agenda to the W3C to create XML, indignantly charged Phone.com with antisocial behavior. "If you want to work with the W3C, you need to work on it. ... The people who are working on WAP need to get with the program."
Maloney compared Phone.com's current position to the one held by Netscape in the mid-1990s, when it was forging past the W3C's more ponderous deliberation process and creating new HTML tags it said its users wanted, things like the blink tag.
"Now Netscape is what it is, it's part of AOL, and it doesn't have that kind of control anymore." Woe to the corporation that doesn't play ball with the W3C.
In general, some complainants at the conference seemed to resent that one particular technology for accessing content on the Web -- specifically, wireless phones -- seemed to be getting special attention because of media hype. But given the predictions that phones will be the way more than half of all web users access the web, is the special attention warranted?
WAP as a Designer's Worst Nightmare
Most web developers currently check their designs on several of the most popular platforms, to ensure that the pages designed on a Macintosh with a 21-inch screen will be legible through Internet Explorer 5 on a Windows 98 laptop as well as through Netscape 4.5 on a Linux box. Those who really want to ensure accessibility test their pages on somewhere between 15 and 20 browser-platform combinations, including Lynx and the W3C's Web Accessibility guidelines.
Early indications on designing content for WAP indicate that the situation is about to get a lot worse. Don Schuerholz, the manager of Phone.com's developer program, told a tutorial audience at WWW9 that they recommend web developers branch their code at the browser and create two interfaces, one for Nokia WAP phones, the other for Motorola. Why's that? "WML's still a little fuzzy on the browser implementation."
And that's in the second quarter of 2000. Imagine within a year when WAP phones with multiple screen sizes are coming from Ericsson, Samsung, Sony, Siemens, and more. Screen resolution and sizes vary. There could be up to 300 clients out there, said Ericsson Telecommunications' Egbert-Jan Sol, speaking at WWW9 last week. "We are going in the wrong direction."
Schuerholz and others put their faith in XSL (XML Style Sheets). Ideally, one should be able to code their data in XML and have XSLT format it for delivery based on the identification of the user agent.
But don't hold your breath. Style sheets for the Web have been around since 1996, and most sites still mark their code with formatting tags. Publishers and application developers who wait for a magic black box that will deliver XHTML to the desktop and WML to the handset may be waiting a while yet.
