On Tue, 7 Oct 2003, Benedict Evans wrote:
> It may be that the delivery mechanism uses bits of the WAP spec over
> GPRS rather than HTTP over GPRS, but who cares?
Developers. WAP versus HTTP nobody cares about, so long as there's
an HTTP to WAP gateway in place, but it's rather easier and cheaper
to develop in CHTML (since it's basically just HTML) than it is to
develop in WML. Even one of the Docomo guys in an interview pointed
out that this was one of the important technological advantages of
Docomo--it used something very close to an open standard. (I don't
consider a standard where the only way to get documentation on it is to
pay hundreds of dollars for it to be "open.")
I think that this is one of the most overlooked aspects of the success
of i-Mode. Especially early on, a developer just starting out with a
mobile site, faced with the choice of which to develop first, would be
almost certain to chose i-mode because you didn't need to spend money,
didn't need to wait for documentation to be shipped to you, and, perhaps
most importantly, could get by without an emulator.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.NetBSD.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
Received on Tue Oct 7 19:47:00 2003