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The Ninth International World Wide Web Conference in Amsterdam consisted of hundreds of sessions on all aspects of the Web, from protocols to applications, from content management systems to convergence in the living room. Fourteen hundred people attended the meeting from around the world, including three from the O'Reilly Network. Here are a few observations from the show.
Convergence was a theme of the conference, represented mostly by the extension of web content to wireless phones. But the next stop is the set-top box in the living room.
But how do people behave in living rooms? Since this was a gathering of computer geeks, and since we never get out of the office, we had to bring in a consumer electronics expert to explain the rules of the living room. Paul de Bot of Philips Digital Networks obliged. "The setting is completely different than a PC environment."
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WWW9 Reports Read O'Reilly Network's other reports from the Ninth International World Wide Web Conference, held in Amsterdam on May 15-19, 2000: All Thumbs at Phone.com Is Phone.com the New Black Hat? Lessig Praises Open Source Coming Together or Falling Apart? |
Despite the common notion of mobile users racing through airports or beaming their cards to each other from one TGV train to another, Eija Kaasinen of Finland's VTT Information Technology research institute reported that the couch is one of the most popular places for mobile usage. Kaasinen said their research found the most common time for using beyond-the-voice phone services was while killing time waiting (for the bus or an appointment), followed by just sitting around at home.
"Surprisingly enough, they use [mobile phones] to keep from being mobile."
Paul de Bot of Philips Digital Networks showed slides of new products that we can expect on shelves within the next year or so, including a retro-looking table-top radio with a phone-link that's designed to play MP3s off the Net.
Philips doesn't want to wait for broadband to sell this radio, but they know streaming at modem speeds isn't going to deliver a satisfactory experience. "We need better algorithms that can deliver CD-quality music at bit rates below 56 K," de Bot said. "Actually, Philips is working on something, and we hope to make an announcement soon."
At a culture track session on Developers' Day, Marco Gaiani of the Politecnico di Milano showed a project representing eight tombs along the Appian Way in great accuracy using VRML 2.0 and Silicon Graphics' old Cosmo Viewer. The question hung in the air: Which is deader, the people in the tombs or VRML?
VRML is hardly dead, according to Gaiani and several in the audience. VRML backers are working on something called Web 3D, a likely successor to VRML as the three-dimensional protocol for cyberspace. "It's too early yet to bury VRML," said one audience member. VRML backers are reportedly working with the W3C on a project called X3D.
Opera was praised, not only for its compliance with traditional standards, but because it reads XML content and is the only browser that can read WML directly. This is an interesting development. A key criticism of the wireless application protocol (and the cornerstone of Phone.com's business model) is that a new piece of hardware, the WAP Gateway, must sit between the web server and the client (the phone). It's the gateway's job to add headers and decode the tiny content coming in from the phone's microbrowser and, on the way back, to strip out headers from the web server and encode data for wireless transmission.
If Opera can read WML directly, and it's small enough to fit on a cel phone, does that mean that web servers could push WML content directly to clients running Opera?
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How much accuracy is good enough? Even before a small percentage of web developers are getting around to coding their content in the new cleaned-up version of HTML, XHTML, some say that's not good enough. The data (that's content for many of us) should be coded in XML and translated to XHTML.
"Don't put your content in XHTML," said Phone.com's Bruce Martin. "I think that's a big mistake. Put it into XML." Coding in XHTML may only take us so far, and it's still aimed at the desktop in his view. "It's very clear to me that the world is getting more heterogeneous, not less." You can read more about XHTML in XHTML: The Clean Code Solution.
Although this wasn't a conference on Bluetooth, the emerging standard for wireless hardware, its name came up frequently in discussions about device form factors. One promising application seems to be a sort of personal wireless LAN. Your future cell phone might be just a headset with a Bluetooth transceiver that would communicate with a small black box that contains a Bluetooth transceiver and the connection to the larger network -- a GSM transceiver in Europe, one of the other technologies in North America or Japan. That black box could also serve as the base station for a range of other devices: your laptop, your MP3 player, your MPEG movie player.
Before Bluetooth, it seemed likely that the wireless phone and PDA would need to merge into one, so wired folk wouldn't need to carry two devices. Nokia's Communicator and Qualcomm's PDQ (with an embedded Palm OS) are the first, bulky attempts at this.
But Bluetooth may lead us the other way, to an explosion of devices, since none would need cables. Picture the day where geeks pack their purse with a half dozen gadgets, all communicating with their Bluetooth box. The industry is already hoping for it -- and battery makers must be pretty excited, too.
"'Overwhelming' is an understatement for the kind of industry support Bluetooth is getting," said Charles Davis, CTO of Psion. "I've never seen anything like it."
Strategy Analysts predicts that 525 million WAP phones will ship in the U.S. and Western Europe by 2003 -- about the time that more than half of all Web users will come in over the phone, rather than on computers. "It's not just a new market; it's the market," said Don Schuerholz, who must be at least a little biased, as he is with Phone.com's developer program.
A big issue at the show was how to develop, serve, and provide security for wireless interaction. "It's not just that the interface is different; people use it differently," said Phone.com's Bruce Martin at a panel titled "Towards a WAP-wide World." First, people are usually more focused on accomplishing a specific task, rather than poking around for information. (Editor's note: Market researchers have told us for years that this is how women approach the Net, more as a tool, while men often see it as a toy.)
Second, the user's location becomes even more important, so services linked to their geography (traffic, shopping, weather) seem likely.
Third, latency is a bigger problem. Not only are you serving to a network that downloads somewhere between 9.6 Kbps and 14.4 Kbps, but users won't have the same patience. Desktop users can multitask while they wait 30 seconds for a page to download, but 30 seconds staring at your Nokia screen can seem like an eternity.
Schuerholz and several other vendors showed their software development kits (SDKs), including emulators that let you run your apps on several models of virtual phones. He said Phone.com offers monthly training programs in WAP and WML, and a conference is planned for San Francisco in July.
Henry Price of the British Broadcasting Company showed applications that the BBC was trying out to extend its distribution. The news organization is already coding content so that one document can feed texts of varying lengths to three different outlets: TV, the Web, and phones.
After his presentation, one audience member criticized the effort for not going far enough, saying the BBC was bringing TV content to the Web, but doing nothing to bring the interactivity of the Web to TV.
"You forget," Price said, "that there are many people who don't want anything beyond TV.
David Sims was the editorial director of the O'Reilly Network.
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