A Frog in the Valley

Alternative catchy title : Open Mobile Web is what happens “off the deck” and outside the “walled garden”… aka “in the wild”.

That’s my thinking at least… Here’s an excerpt from a recent email exchange on one of my projects (anonymized to protect the innocents, namely myself) :

WAP might be the way to go rather than SMS at this point as proof from XYZ telco partnership with UVW Co…

Let’s just agree on semantics here for a moment…

if by WAP you mean “a mobile version of a web page, using xhtml + css and a user experience taking in account the limited screen size and interaction modes available on a cell phone browser”… then yes, call it WAP and let’s do that.

If by WAP you mean something else, I would say then, let’s not get into this, “classic” WAP is *hell*!

Historical reference here : http://www.google.com/search?q=%22wap+is+crap%22

It’s an old theme but I much prefer that we invest our efforts on the “mobile web”, an easy to use and accessible version of an online application instead of going thru the complex route of full “wapification”… Ok so that was my daily rant, back to our regular program now!

What do you think? Is the M-dot trend (m.flickr.com, m.twitter.com, m.wordpress.com) a strong indicator of where the “mobile web” is really going (as asked on Gigaom a while ago and pondered by myself on twitter)?

If these things are of interest to you, also check my mobile category on my link blog (to be integrated here… sometime. Gee, I post there much more than here, wonder what *that* means)…

Tags: accessibility, programming, sms, software development