By Rachel Chalmers
Having persuaded eleven new members to sign up, the chairman of the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) Forum board of directors, Chuck Parrish, has called to explain the work of the Forum, its history and its hopes for the future. The Forum was founded by Nokia Oy, LM Ericsson Telefon AB, Motorola Corp and Unwired Planet Inc. Though the founders were essentially competitors, they accepted that there had to be a common standard for markup in wireless devices. The three mobile phone companies agreed that Unwired Planet’s Handheld Device Markup Language (HDML) and its accompanying transport protocol (HDTP) would be an appropriate basis for such a standard. As Parrish put it: If we all went off and did four incompatible solutions, the market would never take off. Instead, we resolved to make the extension of the internet into the wireless space as good as it could possibly be. They did this in two ways: by using internet technology wherever they could, and by contributing the resulting Wireless Markup Language (WML) back to appropriate standards body. That has led the WAP Forum into a close liaison with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as it struggles to add wireless features to HTML-NG. Their staff come to our meetings and our key people go to their meetings, Parrish says, our goal is that when HTML-NG comes out, a lot of the features in WAP will be incorporated. That shouldn’t be as hard as it sounds. Both WML and HTML-NG will be XML languages. The WAP Forum expects that WML will merge into HTML-NG. The basic constraint of delivering wireless net access is that wireless networks have a thinner pipe which costs more than comparable wired access. TCP/IP is very chatty, as Parrish puts it. It works perfectly well where bandwidth is cheap, but in the wireless market, the engineering trade-offs are very different. The WAP Forum addressed that problem by abstracting the application layer from the underlying bearer services, meaning it can run on a whole range of transport protocols besides TCP/IP. HTTP-NG will tackle the issue in a similar way. Another set of constraints is imposed by the client hardware. Phones typically have low processor power, limited memory and small screens. Technology like that of recent Motorola acquisition Online Anywhere (NBD 10/26/98) attempts to automate the task of reformatting web pages for display on a tiny screen. Parrish considers that a bit of a hack. Frankly, it’s possible but it’s not very pretty, he observes. His solution is to use the W3C’s cascading style sheets (CSS) standard. What a stylesheet does is allow the author of the content to be able to define how they want that content to look, he says, whether it’s on a desktop, set-top box, PDA or mobile phone. WML and WTP are the WAN equivalents of Bluetooth, the emerging industry standard for a wireless personal LAN. The beauty of Bluetooth – and this is what I want in my third generation phone – is that I don’t want to have to care what device I’m using, Parrish explained. He could check his email on his phone screen. To open a multimegabit attachment, all he has to do is open his briefcase, and it’s already been downloaded to his laptop. Clearly, this all overlaps with WirelessKnowledge, the promised fruit of a Microsoft Corp alliance with Qualcomm Inc. Parrish is skeptical about WirelessKnowledge: What they’ve announced is very vague, and the product is a year away, he says. He hopes Microsoft and Qualcomm will decide to join the WAP Forum, making possible a single, unified effort in this space. There’s a way this could all be unified into a common space if they were willing, he says, if they don’t do that I think it’s very unfortunate for the industry. It’s not good for industry, application developers or handset users. Where WML and WAP are open standards, WirelessKnowledge will be a proprietary solution for clients, servers and applications. The strategy is a Microsoft client talking to a Microsoft server talking to Microsoft app
lications, Parrish claims, it’s not open in the same way WAP is open. Our objective is to try to encourage them to try to participate in the open world. If they continue to develop a separate solution, that’s a process that’s likely to confuse the market.
