Russell Beattie

Check it out! I finally found a real live WAP 2.0/XHTML-MP site in the real world at Lonely Planet. It was actually announced just over two months ago, but I didn't even notice it until just this past weekend. This is very cool, as you can see from the screenshot above, the pages look damn cool.

Okay, so first thing, Lonely Planet actually has two mobile sites - a new XHTML-MP site dedicated to the 3650 and an old WAP site. Very interesting... but I can't take a screenshot of the WAP one because it seems to be only for Orange.co.uk customers, which is a shame because I'd love to compare (send me a screen shot if you can you Orange users and I'll post it).

If you use Internet Explorer you can view the XHTML site at http://mobile.lonelyplanet.com, however in Moz you can't see it because, believe it or not, the site is both not well formed and not a valid XHTML-MP doc!! Hehehe it's close enough to count, but includes a lot of HTML baggage along with it - obviously it was done by hand. Moz when it sees the xhtml type, actually tries to parse the markup with an XML parser (the nerve!) and dies because of various errors in the page: doubled attributes, etc.

The interesting thing is that Nokia's default browser doesn't choke on it. Wow... that's setting a very bad precedent, but I can understand why Nokia decided to do it that way. When WAP markup sucks and fails on the phone, it's not the page developer's fault, but the phone's fault, right? My guess is that Nokia doesn't want to see that happen on the 3650s so it's much more tolerant... My best guess, I doubt it's shoddy workmanship or something like that.

Anyways, regardless of whether the markup is good looking, the PAGE is great isn't it? That's a table with multiple colors, CSS, images, etc. INCREDIBLY more compelling than a WAP page. If anyone knows of any other WAP 2.0 pages out there, drop me a email/comment.

-Russ