Re: Review WAP 2.0 Arch.

At 11:12  10/04/01 +0900, Kazuhiro Kitagawa wrote:
>... Are there any person who are interested in reviewing the WAP specs ? ...

Given the lack of take-up of the current version, it may not be worth 
working on WAP 2. Instead the effort could be put into using accepted 
Internet and web standards for mobile devices.

A politically palatable way to do this might be to abandon WAP 2 and create 
WAP 3 as a set of profiles of web and Internet standards for mobile devices 
(MPEG similarly went from 2 to 4, skipping 3).

WAP 3 would avoid features which would be difficult to implement on mobile 
devices, but not introduce any new technology. As an example WML would be 
abandoned and XHTML used, exploiting accessibility features to work on 
mobile devices. Backward compatibility with legacy WAP 1 technology would 
be by the use of gateways and special servers.

This may seem a radical step, but some years ago I was working for the 
Australian Department of Defence on the implementation of GOSIP (Government 
Open System Interconnection Profile). This was a set of ISO standards 
intended to do officially what the Internet did unofficially. After many 
years work we abandoned GOSIP and decided just to use IP, as it worked 
better. WAP similarly may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but it 
is time to get on a do something more useful.


Tom Worthington FACS tom.worthington@tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd ABN: 17 088 714 309
http://www.tomw.net.au PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617
Visiting Fellow, Computer Science, Australian National University
Publications Director & Past President, Australian Computer Society
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Received on Tuesday, 10 April 2001 19:30:50 UTC