RE: Any CC/PP App servers in the market

Of course the big advantage of CC/PP is that schemes like Morphis & Cocoon
do not provide "plug and play" i.e. they cannot adapt content for devices
which are not in their device database. CC/PP allows device manufacturers to
provide information about new devices. That's why it would be better if
programs like Morphis or Cocoon used CC/PP rather than proprietary XML
formats.

The issue about whether to use device classes or not (how to choose your
axis of negotiation) is very important and central in my view to vocabulary
design. The more axis of negotiation, the more flexibility you have (to
paraphrase Johan the more edge cases you can deal with) but also the more
work you need to do provide adaptations of pages or alternate versions of
content on pages. My guess is simple device classes is too little but every
attribute of the device will be more than the content author / servlet
author can be bothered with so you need something in between. 

IMHO I think someone (maybe the CC/PP WG, maybe the Device Independent WG)
needs to think about issues like this and design some standardised
vocabularies which explicitly describe how attributes can be used to adapt
content for target devices. I think there is a danger that if you don't
think about the adaption issue, you can run into problems later. For example
in UAProf there is an attribute called WmlDeckSize i.e. the max size of a
deck (the WML equivalent of a HTML page) that a phone will accept. However
the manufacturers have not agreed whether this value refers to the WML file,
a compressed WML file, or even a WML file with a reply header. Therefore if
someone writes a transcoding proxy in order to turn HTML pages into WML and
chunk them up where necessary into smaller pages they cannot rely on
WmlDeckSize to tell them the maximum size of page to output. A few WAP Forum
members have noticed this problem so hopefully they will clarify the
standard before it is too late.

Mark Butler

-----Original Message-----
From: Johan Hjelm [mailto:johan.hjelm@era-t.ericsson.se]
Sent: 17 August 2001 01:33
To: olivier.rovellotti@3tl.com
Cc: 'Butler, Mark'; 'cafe babe'; www-mobile@w3.org
Subject: Re: Any CC/PP App servers in the market


Actually, they create a device class... Same problem as before. It is always
the
edge cases that get you.

Olivier Rovellotti wrote:

> Mark,
>
> Thanks for the pointers, they both are very interesting approch, and
> specially the morphis effort.
> The information provided by Argogroup is good althought very incomplete.
>
> The XML profiles solution of (http://www.morphis.org/) have a lot more to
> offer so far.
> I am sorry to say that I would be more keen to parse their XML
descriptions
> of a few hundred devices then one or two UA-Prof description :-(
>
> It seems that for the CC/PP-UAProf to be succefull is would really reuired
> more profiles to be available
>
> Sorry to state the obvious
>

Received on Friday, 17 August 2001 06:39:19 UTC