WAP Position Paper for
W3C Workshop on Mobile Access
Relationship of the WAP Forum and the W3C
The WAP Forum was founded with the goal of extending the Internet and Web
into the wireless domain, and as such, views a positive working relationship
with the W3C as necessary for success. The WAP Forum does not intend
to become a standards organization, but rather will propose its specifications
to the appropriate standards organizations and industry groups. The
WAP Forum is an industry interest group designed to support and give input
to existing standards organizations.
-
WAP would like to work with the W3C to identify and resolve issues related
to this market, and to help the W3C understand the unique characteristics
of this area.
-
WAP would like the current specifications to be viewed as expert contributions
toward the goal of a wireless web.
-
WAP has made extensive use of W3C standards in the current specifications,
and intends to continue tracking and incorporating new W3C specifications
as appropriate to the wireless domain.
Background
The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) Forum was founded in June 1997
by Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and Unwired Planet. WAP specifies Internet
content and advanced telephony services access on digital cellular phones
and other narrowband wireless terminals. The WAP Forum has drafted a global
wireless protocol specification for all wireless networks that will be
contributed to appropriate industry and standards bodies. WAP will enable
manufacturers, network operators, content providers, and application developers
to offer compatible products and secure services on all devices and networks,
resulting in greater economies of scale and universal access to information.
WAP Forum membership is open to all industry participants.
The draft specifications, membership details, and other information
are available at http://www.wapforum.org.
Participants in the WAP Forum include:
-
Wireless terminal and infrastructure manufacturers
-
Network operators, carriers, service providers
-
Software houses
-
Content providers
-
Companies developing services and applications for mobile devices
The motivation for the WAP Forum was to create an industry forum to accelerate
the adoption of standard wireless data technologies.
WAP Goals
The WAP Forum is creating specifications with the following goals:
-
Integrate the wireless data networks and devices with the World Wide Web
and Internet
-
Specify an application and content platform suitable for use on narrowband
wireless devices
-
Open to all
-
Independent of wireless network standards
-
Applications scale across transport options
-
Applications scale across device types
-
Extensible over time to new networks and transports
-
Provide a basis for interoperability between implementations from different
vendors
-
Bootstrap the wireless data market
The design approach taken in the protocol specifications is:
-
Define a wireless web, i.e. link the World Wide Web and Internet model
into the wireless domain
-
Initial focus on handheld, wireless phone and pager class devices with
narrowband networking
-
Embrace, leverage, and extend existing technology where it meets the needs
of small wireless devices
-
Define a global standard, supporting all wireless networks, languages and
locales
WAP 1.0
The WAP Forum is currently focused on producing the set of specifications
known as WAP 1.0. WAP 1.0 is a micro-browser architecture that specifies
a complete stack of content transfer protocols, an application framework,
and content formats. The current specifications include:
-
Wireless Application Environment
-
The application framework for WAP applications. This includes both
overview and specification.
-
Wireless Markup Language (WML)
-
An XML-based markup language for narrowband devices, including cellular
phones and pagers.
-
WMLScript
-
A compact scripting language rooted in JavaScript and ECMAScript.
This includes both language and libraries.
-
Wireless Telephony Applications (WTA)
-
A framework for integrating wireless data applications with voice networks.
-
Wireless Session Protocol (WSP)
-
A compact variant of HTTP/1.1 with extensions for wireless data applications.
-
Wireless Transaction Protocol (WTP)
-
An extremely lightweight request-reply-ack transaction protocol.
-
Wireless Transport Layer Security (WTLS)
-
A security protocol rooted in TLS (a.k.a. SSL) adapted to wireless networks
and datagram transports.
-
Wireless Datagram protocol (WDP)
-
A UDP-like datagram protocol for non-IP wireless packet data networks.
Current drafts of the WAP 1.0 specifications can be found at http://www.wapforum.org/docs/.
March 19, 1998, BKM