Peter Roxburgh

Six months ago I convinced my father, a committed technophobe, to connect to the Internet; he wasn't impressed. Last month he bought a WAP phone; he still wasn't impressed. What is impressive is his new-found knowledge of HTTP error messages that could shame many a developer. He's now conversant with errors 400 through 404, a connoisseur of "Internal Server Errors" - and merrily feasts on "Content Type Unacceptable." My father's error-message mastery isn't a symptom of the WAP protocol itself failing: it's symptomatic of the failure of WAP's implementation. A lot of big sites, really big sites, are failing to deliver content to some of their visitors; this is immensely significant. Revenue is lost every day, and consumers become disillusioned, yet the underlying problems remain unexposed and unaddressed. Now's the time to expose and address them! WAP ensures that con... (more)