Highlights From the WWW9 Conference
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Put No Content in XHTML
There's a huge divide between the academic and thorough vision of how code should be implemented on the Web (advocated by people at the conference) and the slipshod, haphazard ways that the tens of millions of people actually putting up content and applications tend to write it.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.
Bluetooth: Personal Wireless LAN
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."
WAP Development.
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.
BBC: Too Much TV?
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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