Not surprisingly, Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola Wednesday endorsed the new
Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) standard developed by the WAP Forum, a
group they co-founded together with Openwave (then Unwired Planet) in 1997.
Since its founding, the forum has grown to more than 450 members, but Nokia,
Ericsson and Motorola remain at its core, and their support is essential to
getting any new specification off the ground. The three vowed to give that
support through the development of products, content and services based on
the new standard.
The new specification, WAP 2.0, promises a simple, powerful tool-kit for
easy development and deployment for a number of new services, including
Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS), which allows users to send messages
combining sounds with images and text.
WAP 2.0 is based on the TCP and HTTP standards, and has adopted XHTML as the
base of its mark-up language. XHTML is widely considered to be the
next-generation mark-up language for the fixed Internet as well, and the
forum hopes its use in WAP 2.0 will narrow the gap between the fixed
Internet and the wireless Internet.
WAP 2.0 also incorporates Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Transport Layer
Security (TLS), HTTP and TCP.
The forum said the new specification also takes WAP Push to the next level.
WAP Push is intended to send out information when something happens, as in
the case of an online auction, rather than making the user search for the
information.
“The work of the WAP Forum has brought us a good and solid set of standards
from which we can start developing the next generation of mobile services,”
said Aage Snorgaard, vice president, Nokia Mobile Phones. “Technologies such
as XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets will be key in delivering high quality
user experience and excitement, which are the essential ingredients of
success in the market.”
The three are hoping that the GSM Association sees WAP 2.0 the same way,
noting that they believe the association should include the specification as
a cornerstone of future versions of its M-services initiative.
