At one point I talked about how together with two other people started a company (bwirelezz) that is specialized in building wireless applications. WAP was the buzzword and we thought we would be ruling the wireless industry. Well we all know what happened to WAP, nothing happened. I said I thought one of reasons that WAP never made it was the way different phones interpreted WML, the mark up language used for WAP. Every phone was different and used there own browser, manufacturers added 'nice' extra's to there browsers and others just ignored the standard. Because of this content needed to be adapted for each mobile phone's user agent. This made it very hard to give the end user of a Nokia phone the same user experience as the user of a Motorola phone. If GSM manufacturers had tried to stick to one standard, it would have been much easier to create content for the phones. Today there are close to 2000 different versions of user agents, and we need framework to make content display correctly on all mobile devices. Ok so this is what I told Dave and Adam. Soon the discussion was about what is happening with RSS and Atom. Wouldn't it be a shame if your favorite news aggregator doesn't display you favorite news anymore because the feed format has changed and isn't it strange that you need to serve feeds in different formats so all aggregators can understand it. Why not take something that has proven to work or merge the better of two worlds, and agree on a standard. What you see happening is that a site like for instance Google is supporting the Atom format while others support the RSS format. End user do not care in what format they get there news as long as it works, so you fire up your favorite feed reader and expect it to show you your favorite stuff. By introducing different sorts of Web log syndication formats you might be introducing the same stuff that was one of the reasons for the failure of wap, incompatibility. I guess that is the analogy Adam and Dave are trying to make in the postings they made on there blogs today.
 
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