[Zope] WAP/WML for Cell Phone Wireless Web?

Duncan Booth duncan@rcp.co.uk
Thu, 4 Nov 1999 09:49:18 +0000


> I'm happy to see some discussion arising about this. I'm currently
> faced with the prospect of migrating some automated HTML-based services
> to narrowband.
I suspect that this will rapidly get off the subject of Zope.

> 
> Put me in the camp of people who think WAP is a naked power grab by
> phone.com and a braindead kludge.
I would agree with 'kludge', but when you examine it closely there 
are reasons behind almost all of the strange decisions. Whether the 
reasons are sufficient justification may be arguable.

> 
> I'd be very interested in the reactions of anyone who has an
> interest in this market to the following assessment (N.B. -- it is
> very long, very complete, and, like anything Rohit turns his estimable
> intelligence to, pretty damned brilliant):
> 
> http://www.ics.uci.edu/~rohit/IEEE-L7-WAP.html
> 
Having read this article briefly, much of what he says seems on the 
face of it to be reasonable comment, however it is now very dated, 
especially in the WML area, and the obvious inaccuracies leave me 
unable to give his arguments much credence.

I cannot really comment about the lower stack levels although a 
quick look at the security layer seems to indicate that even at the 
time he was writing the security allowed support for RSA, Diffie 
Hellman, or Elliptic Curve (listed in that order) rather than just Elliptic 
Curve as he claims.

A lot of his main complaints are no longer accurate. Image tags now 
use src rather than lowsrc, <A href=xxx>...</A> is now perfectly 
valid, the <input> tag is not as he describes it.

I suggest that the author should consider rewriting this article to 
bring it in line with the current state of WAP and then it may be that 
can make his points with more credibility.


-- 
Duncan Booth                                             duncan@dales.rmplc.co.uk
int month(char *p){return(124864/((p[0]+p[1]-p[2]&0x1f)+1)%12)["\5\x8\3"
"\6\7\xb\1\x9\xa\2\0\4"];} // Who said my code was obscure?
http://dales.rmplc.co.uk/Duncan