Re: Is WAP the Web?

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From: Gregory Alan Bolcer (gbolcer@endtech.com)
Date: Wed May 31 2000 - 07:28:23 PDT


Dave Winer wrote:
>
> An interesting group of associated topics, in a single item on today's
> Scripting News..
>
> http://scriptingnews.userland.com/backIssues/2000/05/31
>
> ***Is WAP the Web?
>
> Lance Knobel: "Yesterday's Wall Street Journal Europe had a fascinating
> piece on the strategy telecoms companies are following with WAP. They are
> 'locking' their phones so that you can only access their portal, or even in
> some cases only access sites that have agreements with them. Have these
> people learned nothing from the Web? Yesterday, the French courts ruled that
> France Telecom had to unlock its phones -- but only at users' request!"

A NeoPoint 1000 using SprintPCS and a Nokia 7110 using Orange
will acccess anything you want.

In fact, we've been programming server-side, dynamically generated WML over HTTP for
two months now. For the companies that are locking & limiting, it'll never last.
It's so funny HP and Nokia will charge $13k-$20k for a WAP server when you
can use an Apache+Jserv+JRE+MagiWAP for free. We have this open source project that
I've probably mentioned 10 times on FoRK, but I'll do it again as we are gretting
ready to press release the wireless features. It's called Magi. Magi is
Apache++/--. There's an Internet Computing article on it this month
and the site is magi.endeavors.org; the paper:
http://magi.endeavors.org/Magi/Dir/Greg'Work/Public/IC-Magi-final.pdf
  
The goal is to put a two-way Web, i.e. HTTP+DAV+DynDNS+BuddyListACLs
onto 50M PDAs, 300M Desktops, 1/2B smartphones, and 3B embedded smart
processors. If you think about it, what other software
than HTTP is going to run on all those things, much less make them all
understand each other. That's what I think the next layer of the
Web should look like--understandable by all, runs on everything, secure
access to your own information, and everything's an event destination.

>
> Yesterday at lunch with Rohit, we talked about doing some whitepapers. I
> asked Rohit if he is a writer, and he told me about the O'Reilly books he
> wrote.

Rohit's an exceptionally good writer, but I wouldn't want him to get
a big head. Speaking of which (his writing), this very same Internet Computing
issue has a nice response to his long running Seventh Heaven column
from Dave Raggett on XForms--the goal of which is have the same
back end to be used across a broad range of user interfaces whether
it's WML/WAP or VoiceXML, reduction in effort to build smart forms, and
"some long overdue extensions to the visual user interface". (thank Goodness).

Greg


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