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 COLUMN
HDML or WAP plus WML? IT disaster looms over mobile microbrowser wars NOKIA AND ERICSSON are about to unleash a slew of cell phones for the holiday selling season; these will be the first wave of new models with a WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) browser.
The difference spells trouble. Maybe it won't qualify as Armageddon, but you are about to witness a meltdown in accessing and synchronizing content over wireless devices. If things continue as they are now, IT departments or ASPs (application service providers) hosting wireless business-to-business or business-to-consumer sites will have to support at least two versions of the same content, one for HDML and one for WML. This means that whoever is hosting the site also will have to keep versions simultaneously synchronized as content changes. One industry player said "there is some level of requirements on maintaining dual sites to support both browsers." Sounds like a nightmare. All the wireless network carriers have HDML-enabled gateways to deliver the HDML content to cell phones. Phone.com has about 80 carriers signed up for the sum of about $3 million to $4 million per gateway license fee, say my sources. Because every phone sold in this country connects to a specific gateway, the Nokia and Ericsson phones will have to connect to carriers with WAP/WML. To prove the point: If you want to change wireless carriers you have to throw out your current cell phone and buy one that is made to access the new carrier's network. The exception is GSM (Global System for Mobile communications), which allows you to change SIM (subscriber information module) cards and keep the phone. So as carriers begin to deploy WAP gateways that use WML, they will need content that uses WML for the presentation layer on the cell phones. HDML content cannot be read on WML phones and vice versa. Users will see a message such as "the format or type of information is not correctly formatted." Basically the error message means that whatever browser you are using to access the site is not compatible. Certainly companies will deploy technology to detect the device and the markup language required and present the page accordingly. But to do that you need to write the content in multiple formats. Of course Ericsson and Nokia do not want to use Phone.com's HDML browser -- they want their own WML browsers. Nokia is trying to make its browser ubiquitous by giving away the source code. These issues are as complex and as convoluted as the telecommunications industry they come out of. But when you strip away the double-talk, here's what it means: If you run a corporate IT shop supporting a business-to-business or business-to-consumer wireless solution, you will need to maintain two separate sites into the foreseeable future. And you will need to coordinate updates to both as close to simultaneously as possible so that customers or a company sales force, for example, don't act on the wrong information. Now, if we only had one giant company with so much clout that there was a single operating environment. I'd like to know the difficulties you see in supporting multiple content and keeping it synchronized. Send me an e-mail at ephraim_schwartz@infoworld.com. And the winner is ... After sifting through hundreds of entries to find a new name for wireless technology, David Telford came up with not one but two good replacements. Telford says that with wireless technology becoming so widespread, each device should be defined as a "point of presence," which we could shorten to "pop." "I got a new Motorola pop in my car," or "my house is pop-ready." As a verb, "I'll pop that to you tonight." Or " I just popped the news," and "pop him with a message." Telford's other entry is also good. He simply shortened wireless technology to "tech," similar to how horseless carriage became car. Tech rolls off the tongue nicely, Telford says. He notes it will lend itself to such sentence constructions as "man, this ride is tech," to describe a car fitted with wireless technology. So, to David Telford, by way of a recommendation from Jeff Prather, the senior wine merchant at www.wine.com, goes a bottle of 1994 Robert Hunter Brut de Noirs "Extended Tirage," from Sonoma Valley, Calif. We call it champagne. Ephraim Schwartz is an editor-at-large in InfoWorld's news department.  RELATED SUBJECTS  E-CommerceSoftware DevelopmentWeb TechnologiesMORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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