The End of WAP
I was sitting in the Mobile Mondays NY meeting last week, listening to the SEO advice from the very level-headed guy at Google, and realized that everyone on stage was preaching what we have been trying to educate people on for years in the industry: WAP is different from the Web. It’s really different. You can’t just point people at your .com site and expect their phones not to crash, you need to accommodate users in ways you never have before. At its easiest, this just means directing them to a watered down site with a few pages of text, but if you’re really serious about it, this means building a fully adaptive site that scales its images, custom-tailors its stylesheets (or lack of), and even completely changes the markup from WML to XHTML-MP to CHTML.
That’s what we’ve been preaching for years, and it’s finally about to become irrelevant.
About a million iPhones are out there around now, and growing fast. Maybe even more Nokia N95s or other extra-smart gadgets are out there. Some of the new phones can’t even read WML, but they all execute Javascript like nobody’s business. They’re normal browsers.. nearly. Over the last week, potentially thousands of users stopped going to the mobile-specific sites and started going directly to their usual desktop web sites. Even more people browsed the web for the first time ever on their phones.
What does this mean for the mobile web as we know it so far? Is it so niche that it’s not even worth looking at, because it’ll be so overtaken by users with smart devices that it will become invisible on the radar?
Probably. The mobile web will never be as complicated as it is today. It’s a patchwork of support, where when you evaluate the characteristics of one device, you add support to about 0.8% of your customers. The mobile web sites have been outsourced to development companies that build a mobile-friendly version of the site, usually completely decoupled from the real site, with its own revenue streams. Soon, all you’ll need is a separate stylesheet, if that.
It’s hard to say it, but we knew the day would come: WAP as we know it has peaked and the days of a totally different mobile site will be on their way to the dustbin.
This doesn’t mean that mobile web development will die, it will just become far simpler. I still don’t believe that a page designed for a 19″ display will ever be desirable on a 3″ display, but that’s easier to fix: Most of the changes will be doable with the same content, with a separate stylesheet (incidentally, why doesn’t the iPhone respond to the ‘handheld’ CSS media type so that you don’t have to do any detection at all?). In the meantime, though, those of us who fought for years to explain the dire difference between the two worlds need to adjust our tunes.