Thursday, August 10, 2000
Welly well well! I’m back from a bit of the ole’ ultra-violence (otherwise known as a “Corporate Conference”). The first two days we operated at warp +9 (which will peel back the hull of a moderate trade ship, not to mention what it will do to your skull!) Granted, this is mostly due to the fact that my company is way behind in deploying WAP technology and this is really our only opportunity to stratagize on the deployment as well as bang out any infrastructure issues. (Heh, issues? Nah! No problem, man! yeah, right!) The third day was absolutely excruciating! We went from warp +9 to snail -3 and it was all an overview! Needless to say, we skipped out a bit early on this!
Now for the actual good stuff! WAP (wireless application protocol) is actually rather intriguing and may prove to be quite useful! The protocol allows for very solid connections at 9.6k which is definitely enough bandwidth for text based sites. (Which is what this is designed for to begin with) There are two big concepts here: First there is the transition between http and wsp (the wireless equivalent to http). A web page designed for the mobile user is encoded using wml (wireless markup language) and then served to the central office (my office in this instance) where the transport mechanism becomes wsp. Wsp then carries the document to the phone for browsing. This brings me to the second concept: browsing a wap document is a bit different than navigating an html doc. The base structure is the same, but in the case of wml documents are represented as “decks”. Each screen that is displayed is known as a card. The entire deck is downloaded into the phone and then the user is allowed to navigate between the cards. Pretty basic interpretation, but that is the general drift. Check WapForum.Org for more details.
August 10, 2000 6:49 pm 
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