Your thoughts on WAP?

I personally like having my e-mail available on my phone.

You are arguing that the interface is poor not the technology. The
interface will improve.

"Mike Sax" <mike@saxsoft..com.> wrote in message
news:39e73fcb$1@news.dev-archive.com...
> In spite of all the hype, WAP will never achieve broad appeal: It's too
> hard to use, and there is too little value. Have you ever tried entering
a
> website using your phone's numeric keypad? It slow, difficult, and
> frustrating. So is browsing through the hierarchical set of menus. Once
> you finally get to where you want to be, the information is presented in a
> tiny screen while your neck hurts from bending down staring at your cell
> phone the whole time.

Hmmm... So phones with displays will stop being supported by someone?

I'll bet that in the next five years we will see PDA and phone capabilities
blossom into full fledged MM platoforms in their own right. Further I bet
that WML/WAP contribute mightily to the delivery of the content.

BTW has anyone tried to use soap method invocation from a phone yet?

"Steve Wade" <stevew@prophet.co.uk> wrote in message
news:39ea360d$1@news.dev-archive.com...

> That's what the OS2 guys used to say!

> You are arguing that the interface is poor not the technology.
> The interface will improve.

The interface doesn't have any room to improve. The hardware is a
limitation, with very tiny screens. The software only lets you pick from a
menu or enter data using a keyboard that requires an average of more than
two key presses for each character. You can argue that the screens will get
bigger and that "WAP 2.0 will solve all those problems", and I'm sure that's
true. But my point was that WAP as it currently exists is not useful enough
to achieve widespread usage.

The hardest and biggest obstacle (from a techniqual point of view) will be
to develop applications that looks good and works within the hundreds of
different browsers out there (and not yet out there:-), each device has its
own capabilities, memory storage, screen size, different WAP version etc.
We will see a race of platforms that tries to overcome this problem like
Oracle Portal-to-go and the IBM Transcoder but there is still a long way
to walk!

Until that is solved, its impossible to do more complex thing like "Hello
world" if we want everyone with a WAP device to be able to access it...

Regards
sten

"Stefan Grnwedel" <sgrunwedel@dev-archive.com> wrote:
>
>Welcome to the WAP newsgroup on dev-archive! Please feel free to discuss any concerns,
>issues, problems, etc. that you have with WAP development.
>
>What are your thoughts on this spec, anyway? At last week's Wireless World
>2000 in New York ( http://www.wirelessworld2000.com/index.html ), there
was
>a debate pro and con WAP. Raj Gupta, CEO of YadaYada, hated it but Devin
>Pike, an editor at AnywhereYouGo.com, thought it had merits.
>
>Does "WAP take companies away from their core competencies by making content
>creators worry about transport and protocols and wireless carriers worry
>about content and servers?"
>
>Jeromy Hill, the dev-archive Wireless Development Pro, wrote in a recent editorial
>that the question is not whether WAP can survive but will it?
>http://www.dev-archive.com/free/press/2000/081800.asp
>
>Regards,
>
>Stefan Grnwedel
>Senior Editor, dev-archive.com, Inc.

I disagree...

I have also ran a couple of projects based on XML/XSLT where each device
had its own set of stylesheets generating the WML for the application. It
worked quite nice when we just had four - five devices to consider (half
year ago), but it soon turned into a pure XSL-**** when new devices was released
every "week"!! It is still quite easy to add a new devices but its a nightmare
to maintain the application (e.g. change the flow, adding new features etc)
keeping all sets of stylesheets synchronized.

Your application works well now but does it scale to 60+ devices (the estimated
number of WAP devices by summer 2001)??

A solution to this XSL-**** could be to abstract more doing like Portal-to-Go
and have one set of XSLs for the application generating an abstract layout,
and one XSL for each device converting it into appropriate WML or equal.
This looks nice on paper but its not very easy to implement, the browsers
behaves so different and has very shifting capabilities, this limits an abstract
layout language to only contain the very simplest layout elements, else it
wouldn't be convertable to suite all browsers...
And on top of this we have to make the application look decent in devices
with all possible screen dimensions and resolutions...
And on top of this we have to think of the memory capacity for each device,
how big pages can we send to the browser and how should this be treated in
our stylesheets...
And on top of th...

Is there any other techniques suitable for this kind of 6-dimensional problem??

So for a while I think we can forget to develop "more" complex applications
that should be accessable by any type of device...

Regards
sten

"Gypsy" <gyspy617@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>While I agree that the main problem is to get a WML page to display nicely
>in all the different WAP browsers out there,
>I have to disagree to the fact that you can't build any relatively complex
>application...
>I have been actually pretty successful in developing applications
>for cell phones using Java, XML/XSLT. You have to realize that the two main
>browsers (in the US) are the UPBrowser (Phone.com)
>and the Nokia one.You can either design a generic display that
>shows up decently in both of them, or use User Agent recognition
>to load a different XSL file for each one of them...
>Furthermore, I'd like to make a few points, based on what I have been reading
>in this newsgroup:
>-The WAP browser is not intended to replace the HTTP browser.
> What you want your cell phone users to have is time-critical,
> location-based info e.g where is the nearest ATM, checking
> stock quotes...What I am talking about is extending our apps
> to incorporate the mobile user.
>-In my opinion,iMode is NOT going to replace WAP.First, the WAP
> 2.0 specifications are taking in the iMode specifications.
> Second, the future of the Web leans towards XML (that's why
> we have XHTML),and iMode uses cHTML,which is a subset of plain
> ol' HTML..WML is XML-based.
>
> Regards,
> Gypsy.
>
>"sten" <ofd@ausys.se> wrote:
>>
>>
>>The hardest and biggest obstacle (from a techniqual point of view) will
>be
>>to develop applications that looks good and works within the hundreds of
>>different browsers out there (and not yet out there:-), each device has
>its
>>own capabilities, memory storage, screen size, different WAP version etc.
>>We will see a race of platforms that tries to overcome this problem like
>>Oracle Portal-to-go and the IBM Transcoder but there is still a long way
>>to walk!
>>
>>Until that is solved, its impossible to do more complex thing like "Hello
>>world" if we want everyone with a WAP device to be able to access it...
>>
>>Regards
>>sten
>>
>>
>>
>>"Stefan Grnwedel" <sgrunwedel@dev-archive.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>Welcome to the WAP newsgroup on dev-archive! Please feel free to discuss any
concerns,
>>>issues, problems, etc. that you have with WAP development.
>>>
>>>What are your thoughts on this spec, anyway? At last week's Wireless World
>>>2000 in New York ( http://www.wirelessworld2000.com/index.html ), there
>>was
>>>a debate pro and con WAP. Raj Gupta, CEO of YadaYada, hated it but Devin
>>>Pike, an editor at AnywhereYouGo.com, thought it had merits.
>>>
>>>Does "WAP take companies away from their core competencies by making content
>>>creators worry about transport and protocols and wireless carriers worry
>>>about content and servers?"
>>>
>>>Jeromy Hill, the dev-archive Wireless Development Pro, wrote in a recent editorial
>>>that the question is not whether WAP can survive but will it?
>>>http://www.dev-archive.com/free/press/2000/081800.asp
>>>
>>>Regards,
>>>
>>>Stefan Grnwedel
>>>Senior Editor, dev-archive.com, Inc.
>>
>