Re: Feedback on CT Document

>> 1. In section 1.3 the term "distributed user agent" is
>> used. What does this mean?
>
> I guess we may remove "distributed" if that's not clear,
> the meaning being that the user agent black box in that 
> case is composed of a local component (from the end-
> user's point of view) and a remote one, and is thus
> distributed.

Before rushing to erase this concept, it would be advisable to determine why it was used in the first place. Perhaps there is a very good technical reason it is present in the document.

> There is no normative way to detect "Web content 
> intended for regular browsing".

Developers have raised the issue of non-Web browsing HTTP traffic that got disturbed by transcoders. Is there a way to conclusively identify some HTTP traffic as _not_ being Web browsing? Notice this is the contraposition of what was stated in the document originally (i.e. trying to be certain that some traffic is not browsing, and handling what is not conclusively identifed together with browsing traffic vs. trying to ascertain some traffic as being indeed browsing, and handling what is not conclusively identifed as non-browsing).

> I do not know if transformations other than compression
> are applied to WML content (i.e. to transform from 
> WML to WML), though. Are there any? I note that this
> would de facto prevent conversion of WML content to 
> (X)HTML, but think it is OK, because a server that 
> serves WML content is already aware of the mobile
> context, and most WML developers probably are aware
> of the existence of non-WML browsers among mobile
> devices.

This is why I propose that we state that "transformations  of WML formally specified in a published standard" are acceptable. There are at least two of them:
1. Encoding from WML to WBXML.
2. Conversion of WML1.x to WML2.0. 

(1) is specified in "Binary XML Content Format Specification" WAP-192-WBXML-20010725-a, and in "Wireless Markup Language Specification Version 1.3" WAP-191-WML19 February 2000. 

(2) is specified in "WML Transformations" WAP-244-WMLTR-20011106-a. It answers partially the question of François about the WML to XHTML route, since WML2 is nothing else than XHTML mobile profile with WML-backwards-compatibility features. It was specified precisely to allow the migration from WML-based WAP1 to XHTML-based WAP2.

E.Casais

Received on Wednesday, 26 November 2008 18:23:02 UTC