WAP/WML for Cell Phone Wireless Web?
Has anyone looked at using Zope to serve WML (wireless markup language) pages that can be read by cell-phones. I'm here in Washington DC, and it seems as if Sprint PCS will have this service soon. It sounds pretty good. If I understand it correctly, your phone sends out a request which is turned into a http request by the cell phone company. The site then returns wml (an xml doctype), not html, which deals with things like what the buttons do, as well as encoding whatever content you can fit on the tiny screen. So all a zope site would have to do is add a new mime type (not sure what it is), and serve up the wml rather than html. Using zope DTML and regular zope stuff to handle common menus and control of pages should all fall together. The only things that would have to be changed (and I don't know how to do this) are: 1) mime type 2) file suffix (.wml instead of .html) Has anyone looked at this? Anyone interested? -- cary Cary O'Brien cobrien@radix.net Links: http://www.openwap.org http://www.wapforum.org http://www.phone.com
Has anyone looked at using Zope to serve WML (wireless markup language) pages that can be read by cell-phones. I'm here in Washington DC, and it seems as if Sprint PCS will have this service soon. It sounds pretty good. See http://www.rcp.co.uk/distributed/wapdemo for a demonstration WAP application written using Zope (HTML pages with screenshots, and also a link to the actual demo for those with WAP browsers). You need a Nokia toolkit to run the demo, there are issues using a real 7110, or a non-Nokia browser.
So all a zope site would have to do is add a new mime type (not sure what it is), and serve up the wml rather than html. Setting the mime type is the easy bit. Actually my standard_wap_header checks the browser and sets the mime type to text/plain if it is begins with Mozilla, and WAP otherwise. This is useful for debugging.
standard_wap_header: <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.1//EN" "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml_1.1.xml"> <!-- content-type set in footer --> <wml> standard_wap_footer: </wml> <dtml-if "HTTP_USER_AGENT[:7]!='Mozilla'"> <dtml-call "RESPONSE.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/vnd.wap.wml')"> <dtml-else> <dtml-call "RESPONSE.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/plain')"> </dtml-if> Harder bits include: POST doesn't work with some browsers (I am told the authors on at least one browser claim that the standard makes it perfectly legal to use a page from cache instead of rerequesting a page even if it was originally returned as a result of a POST with different field values.) I also hear that the 7110 limits URLs to 127 characters, so that kind of messes up storing session information in the request string, although that is what my demo currently does). The phone variables may be cleared on a least recently used basis at any time, so you cannot reliably store session information there either. Cookies are not supported by any of the existing gateways, (apparently this is because privacy issues preclude the identity of the phone being made available to the gateway). Decks are limited to 1400 bytes after compilation. Compilation normally makes pages smaller, but can make them larger. (A python WML compiler would be really useful here.) A lot of my zope code was to do with splitting long lists up into smaller lists spread over multiple decks. Strange inconsistencies between browser make it almost impossible to write one WAP application that runs on more than one browser. for example, the top page of my demo includes two links on the options menu which on the Nokia emulator are listed with appropriate captions. On the Nokia 7110 phone these links both display with the caption 'Unknown'. -- Duncan Booth duncan@dales.rmplc.co.uk int month(char *p){return(124864/((p[0]+p[1]-p[2]&0x1f)+1)%12)["\5\x8\3" "\6\7\xb\1\x9\xa\2\0\4"];} // Who said my code was obscure? http://dales.rmplc.co.uk/Duncan
[Duncan Booth, on Mon, 01 Nov 1999]: :: > Has anyone looked at using Zope to serve WML (wireless markup :: > language) pages that can be read by cell-phones. I'm here in :: > Washington DC, and it seems as if Sprint PCS will have this :: > service soon. It sounds pretty good. :: :: See http://www.rcp.co.uk/distributed/wapdemo for a demonstration :: WAP application written using Zope (HTML pages with screenshots, :: and also a link to the actual demo for those with WAP browsers). :: You need a Nokia toolkit to run the demo, there are issues using a :: real 7110, or a non-Nokia browser. I'm happy to see some discussion arising about this. I'm currently faced with the prospect of migrating some automated HTML-based services to narrowband. Put me in the camp of people who think WAP is a naked power grab by phone.com and a braindead kludge. I'd be very interested in the reactions of anyone who has an interest in this market to the following assessment (N.B. -- it is very long, very complete, and, like anything Rohit turns his estimable intelligence to, pretty damned brilliant): http://www.ics.uci.edu/~rohit/IEEE-L7-WAP.html
I'm happy to see some discussion arising about this. I'm currently faced with the prospect of migrating some automated HTML-based services to narrowband. I suspect that this will rapidly get off the subject of Zope.
Put me in the camp of people who think WAP is a naked power grab by phone.com and a braindead kludge.
I would agree with 'kludge', but when you examine it closely there are reasons behind almost all of the strange decisions. Whether the reasons are sufficient justification may be arguable.
I'd be very interested in the reactions of anyone who has an interest in this market to the following assessment (N.B. -- it is very long, very complete, and, like anything Rohit turns his estimable intelligence to, pretty damned brilliant):
Having read this article briefly, much of what he says seems on the face of it to be reasonable comment, however it is now very dated, especially in the WML area, and the obvious inaccuracies leave me unable to give his arguments much credence. I cannot really comment about the lower stack levels although a quick look at the security layer seems to indicate that even at the time he was writing the security allowed support for RSA, Diffie Hellman, or Elliptic Curve (listed in that order) rather than just Elliptic Curve as he claims. A lot of his main complaints are no longer accurate. Image tags now use src rather than lowsrc, <A href=xxx>...</A> is now perfectly valid, the <input> tag is not as he describes it. I suggest that the author should consider rewriting this article to bring it in line with the current state of WAP and then it may be that can make his points with more credibility. -- Duncan Booth duncan@dales.rmplc.co.uk int month(char *p){return(124864/((p[0]+p[1]-p[2]&0x1f)+1)%12)["\5\x8\3" "\6\7\xb\1\x9\xa\2\0\4"];} // Who said my code was obscure? http://dales.rmplc.co.uk/Duncan
participants (3)
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Cary O'Brien -
Duncan Booth -
Patrick Phalen