1G Mobile information appliances

It’s quite harrowing to read history. I have discovered an artifact, where WAP Forum and others debate about how to do the Mobile Web.

WAP Forum decided to create their own protocols, instead of using Internet protocols such as HTTP or the amazing homegrown Mowgli approach to solve narrow and noisy problems associated with wireless networking. That’s history.

There are such juicy quotes:

Unwired Planet:

Q: If existing web standards are hard to support, use e-mail and ascii display.

It’s not enough.

W3C (Henrik Nielsen):


Q: HTTP is not needed on wireless

current HTTP may be not best, but why do you need new protocol?

Q: Don’t you trust gateways?

religious

NTT DoCoMo:
New Interactive Media over the Mobile Communication Network

Q: How the content provider generate pages?

This is just Compact HTML. Content provider will write text based primitive page.

Q: Is there any SDK or tools to convert existing pages?

No, we provide a guidline.

Q: To support various clients is hard.

Nobody can say that thisi is the best way, The market will decide.

Prof. Martti Tienari:


Q: use HTTP/1.1, it will 5 times speed up.

Mowgli can 2–20 times speed up. It depends on data.

Found any of my content interesting or useful?