From the Web to WAP

Over the past decade, the Internet has moved from command line-oriented tools like telnet and ftp to the full-screen menu structure of gopher and finally to the graphical, massively hypertext-linked database that is the World Wide Web. Access to the burgeoning information resources on the Web was limited at first. After Internet access spread from academia and the government to the commercial and home realms, pundits predicted skyrocketing access costs and per-minute fees. Instead, we now see less expensive access and a plethora of free Internet access services. Today, it is not just the information professional who wanders the Web. It seems that everyone does, from school children to the retired, from Albania to Zambia. With all of this activity, change is constant, with new technologies on the rise as older ones show signs of age. In my own recent wanderings, a new acronym has been on the rise: WAP.

WHAT IS WAP?

WAP is the acronym for Wireless Application Protocol. It is an Internet protocol developed for transferring information on the Internet to and from wireless clients. These wireless clients can run on cellular phones, palm computing devices, and other small, portable terminals. At this point, cell phones are the primary WAP devices. Protocol details and more information about the developing standard are available at the WAP Forum (www.wapforum.org).

One of the main WAP issues has less to do with the wireless aspect than it does with the display limitations. Think of most Web pages that you view. Even on the simple, clean layouts, most Web pages have a great deal of text, graphics, and other information packed on a single page. With a WAP device, the screen real estate is greatly reduced. Some of the Internet-enabled cell phones have three lines of 12 characters each. Not all such devices have that limited a display, but compared even to a 640 x 480 screen resolution on older desktop or laptop computers, the WAP display space is extremely small.

On top of the display problem is the input difficulty. There is no QWERTY keyboard on a cell phone. Instead, they offer the 10-number pad with three letters corresponding to each number of an ordinary telephone. Orktopas (a purposeful-sort of-misspelling of Octopus) offers basic information and...