[webkit-dev] Why WAP?

[George Staikos]

It's nice to live in your own little land in the Bay Area and have  
megabits of direct internet connection but billions of people are in  
a place where bandwidth is at a premium and in many cases access is  
only via a WAP gateway.  I had the pleasure of spending a lot of time  
in that environment last year.  We went through the discussion of  
including mobile standards earlier: http://marc.info/?l=webkit- 
dev&m=124217066116839&w=2  This isn't a science[1] project.  It's an  
engineering[2] project.

There are 493,124,000 subscribers[3] to China Mobile alone, the vast  
majority of which have only WAP access.  I don't think we need more  
statistics to validate the importance.  Don't look for it to help  
Chrome.  It won't.  It's not the solution to that problem.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science
2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering
3: http://www.chinamobileltd.com/


On 6-Aug-09, at 9:45 PM, Eric Seidel wrote:

> Why do we have patches for WAP support?
>
> WAP is big in asian markets, yes?
> Can someone provide some data as to how big?  Is the market for WAP  
> growing?  It seems that the various posted -wap- patches have  
> limited utility for the rest of WebKit.  It seems to me (although I  
> am the first to admit ignorance here!) that WAP is a dying  
> technology and I don't see why we would want to add the complexity  
> to WebKit.
>
> I worry the proposed WAP support patches violate some of our non- 
> goals.
> http://webkit.org/projects/goals.html
> WebKit is an engineering project not a science project.
> WebKit is not the solution to every problem.

--
George Staikos
Torch Mobile Inc.
http://www.torchmobile.com/

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