WAP does not enable users to view standard web pages in anything like a usable fashion, but rather is most useful when services are rendered by content providers specifically for delivery to wireless devices. Sprint reports that less than 10 percent of PCS customers with WAP-enabled phones are currently using them for that purpose. But whether we will be designing cards or pages in 3 years remains to be seen. The W3C is at an early stage of development of its mobile strategy. However, the group seems to have intelligently chosen to focus on user-agent profiling as the major hurdle to a coherent set of standards.
Lightweight clients can be lightweight, and robust clients can be robust.
The W3C continues to show clear thinking in their approach to the mobile problem. The question is whether they will be able to move fast enough and get the industry to adopt their ideas. Their collection of RFCs lay out a set of lower-level protocols to perform transmission between WAP clients and the web at large. Hopefully, the LEAP protocols and the W3C standards are the future of the wireless web, but this remains to be seen. This service is widespread in Europe and Asia and many US digital service providers offer this service, including SprintPCS in the Charlottesville area.