Conflicts Stalk Wireless Data Spec
By Junko Yoshida, EE Times
Jul 28, 2000 (5:34 PM)
URL: techweb.com
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Wireless Access Protocol Forum are working to craft the next-generation wireless data delivery specification, WAP 2.0. The delicate work may end up merging underlying technologies used in two dominant mobile wireless data services: NTT (stock: NTT) Docomo's successful i-Mode and the existing WAP.
At the heart of the effort is a drive to leverage the groundwork laid by W3C in hopes of converging HTML subsets and variants into a common subset of XHTML.
The W3C has produced a working draft of XHTML Basic, edited by three companies, two of which have been in direct competition: Phone.com (stock: PHCM), Redwood City, Calif., which pioneered WAP, and Access Co., Tokyo, which designed Compact HTML, the underlying markup language for i-Mode.
The third player, Panasonic, is joining the collaboration to seek a common ground for future markup languages aimed at content for small information appliances.
The WAP Forum, using W3C's working draft, is scheduled to complete the first draft of the WAP 2.0 spec in September and to roll out the next-generation WAP specifications before year's end.
"The next generation WAP spec will essentially converge WAP protocols with Internet standards," said Peter King, chief architect at Phone.com.
Sources close to those developing WAP 2.0, however, noted that debates are heating up within the WAP Forum over the issue of backward compatibility, as software vendors, cell phone OEMs, and wireless service providers scramble to ensure a WAP follow-on that comes as close as possible to their current wireless data service implementations.
Phone.com's King said he expects the new markup language in WAP 2.0 will maintain "compatibility with the previous Wireless Markup Language [WML]" used in today's WAP.
OEMs designing next-generation handsets are caught in the crossfire. If the WAP 2.0 spec "mandates" backward compatibility with the current WML rather than make it an option, "cell phone manufacturers such as Panasonic, Nokia (stock: NOK) and Ericsson (stock: ERICY) will have to bear the burden of doubling code size -- thus doubling the memory required in a handset -- to support separate WML- and XHTML-enabled browsers," warned Kiyoyasu Oishi, vice president of marketing at Access Systems America, Milpitas, Calif., a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Access.
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