It's nice to live in your own little land in the Bay Area and have megabits of direct internet connection but billions of people are in a place where bandwidth is at a premium and in many cases access is only via a WAP gateway.  I had the pleasure of spending a lot of time in that environment last year.  We went through the discussion of including mobile standards earlier: http://marc.info/?l=webkit-dev&m=124217066116839&w=2  This isn't a science[1] project.  It's an engineering[2] project. 

There are 493,124,000 subscribers[3] to China Mobile alone, the vast majority of which have only WAP access.  I don't think we need more statistics to validate the importance.  Don't look for it to help Chrome.  It won't.  It's not the solution to that problem.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science
2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering
3: http://www.chinamobileltd.com/


On 6-Aug-09, at 9:45 PM, Eric Seidel wrote:

Why do we have patches for WAP support?

WAP is big in asian markets, yes?
Can someone provide some data as to how big?  Is the market for WAP growing?  It seems that the various posted -wap- patches have limited utility for the rest of WebKit.  It seems to me (although I am the first to admit ignorance here!) that WAP is a dying technology and I don't see why we would want to add the complexity to WebKit.

I worry the proposed WAP support patches violate some of our non-goals.
WebKit is an engineering project not a science project.
WebKit is not the solution to every problem.

--
George Staikos
Torch Mobile Inc.