Wireless: A confusing Landscape

New Orleans was very much in the news this week, and not just because of Mardi Gras. In a level of excite­ment rem­i­nis­cent of that felt in the early days of the Inter­net World trade shows, the CTIA Wire­less 2000 con­fer­ence opened its doors.

AOL started mov­ing fur­ther on its AOL Any­where Strat­egy by announc­ing part­ner­ships to deliver its Instant Mes­sen­ger ser­vices on the Bell South and Sprint PCS net­work and to equip Neo­point, Nokia, and Motorola devices with the nec­es­sary soft­ware to do this too.

Microsoft announced part­ner­ships with Nex­tel and Air­touch to deliver MSN to their net­works. This fol­lows recent announce­ments by Microsoft that its tech­nol­ogy would be inte­grated in Sony and Quall­com wire­less devices.

Mean­while, Palm Com­put­ing announced a deal with Sun Microsys­tems to make Sun’s iPlanet ser­vice avail­able to Palm VII users.

But with all the hype, one has to won­der whether wire­less is truly here and what hur­dles it has to over­come. From this issue on, I will take a quick look at some of the issues fac­ing wire­less web imple­men­tors these days, adding wire­less as a new cat­e­gory of cov­er­age. We will start with the formats.

WAP, WML, HDML, PQA???

It seems the wire­less space in adept at devel­op­ing a new set of stan­dards. While this world is just bur­geon­ing, a num­ber of imple­men­ta­tions have already surfaced.

WAP

: As defined by the WAP Forum, WAP is the Wire­less Appli­ca­tion Pro­to­col. Think of it essen­tially as HTTP for the wire­less crowd. Backed by the W3C, the IETF, and the ECMA, as well as most large wire­less indus­try play­ers, WAP has become the de facto stan­dard for wire­less deliv­ery. How­ever, some com­pa­nies (NTT comes to mind) have tried pre­sent­ing alter­na­tives to WAP and have so far been rel­a­tively unsuc­cess­ful. How­ever, I doubt that WAP will go very far as it lim­its the num­ber of char­ac­ters that can be sent to about 1600. For stock quotes or weather reports, it’s a great think but beyond that, I doubt that any­one will use it for Ecom­merce or content.

WML

: WML stands for Wire­less Markup Lan­guage and is an XML based sub­set of HTML. How­ever, a war as bro­ken out in that space, with phone.com (one of the early pio­neers in the wire­less space) strik­ing out on its own and devel­op­ing a com­pet­ing stan­dard called HDML.

HDML

: HDML, or Hand­held Markup Device Lan­guage, phone.com pro­posal for a new markup lan­guage. At the cur­rent time, the W3C has worked with phone.com and other markup lan­guage part­ners in an attempt to resolve the incom­pat­i­bil­i­ties between the two offer­ings. With the cachet of WML increas­ing over the past year, phone.com has started sup­port­ing both for­mat but offers HDML has a lan­guage with new tags that allow it to extend WML appli­ca­tions. Because it was an early player in the field, phone.com has taken a lead and could be the Microsoft or Netscape of that space. As a result, the exten­sions they are pro­vid­ing can’t be ignored.

HTML 4.0 mobile

: Last year, with the intro­duc­tion of HTML 4.0, the W3C made some rec­om­men­da­tions in terms of sup­port­ing HTML for wire­less devices. Throw­ing fur­ther con­fus­ing in the wire­less space, the W3C decided that HTML 4.0 and its suc­ces­sors might be the way to go, throw­ing more oil on the wire­less fire. While no rec­om­men­da­tion has been made yet on an actual stan­dard and in spite of the W3C’s claim that it is work­ing to resolve dis­putes with the W3C, expect some seri­ous in-fighting between the dif­fer­ent groups as they try to posi­tion them­selves in the next hot web appli­ca­tion space.

PQA (Palm Web Clippings)

: A cou­ple of years ago, I pointed out that the Palm OS could be a poten­tial Java com­peti­tor in the non-PC devices space. As could be expected, Palm went out and intro­duced the Palm VII, a wire­less device with con­nec­tions to the web. What was sur­pris­ing, how­ever, is that instead of going out and sup­port­ing either WML, HDML, or even HTML, they decided to intro­duce their own for­mat to dis­trib­ute web con­tent: PQA or the Palm Query Appli­ca­tion lan­guage. PQA is a paired-down HTML ver­sion that allows you to dis­trib­ute con­tent on the wire­less Palm plat­form. Since ser­vices like OmniSky plan to offer wire­less access to Palm devices other than the Palm VII, and since Palm already has an estab­lished foot­print in the PDA space, expect PQA appli­ca­tions to pop up left and right.

A lot of for­mat but what do I imple­ment for?

At the cur­rent time, it seems there are no clear win­ners in the space how­ever it seems clear that WAP has a strong lead in the deliv­ery space for small bits of data. But WAP will not be the way to do Ecom­merce or con­tent as a clear char­ac­ter lim­i­ta­tion makes it fairly use­less for this. On the markup front, I’d strongly rec­om­mend look­ing at WML as it has received sup­port from some of the larger play­ers (Microsoft and Sun, among oth­ers) and seems to be the basic level of func­tion­al­ity. How­ever, you should also look very seri­ously at the PQA for­mat because of Palm’s extremely large foot­print in the PDA space.

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