Technically it is is operational within operators. Old mobile phones still have an advantage that has completely been forgotten with smartphone, it is their very long battery lifetime, and there are still mobile phones sold today that are NOT smartphones, have NO Internet connectivity (only GSM/EDGE and SMS) and that will remain in charge for about 2 weeks, when my smartphone gets out of charge in less than 24 hours (or several times a day). So no complex layered networking protocol stacks, no advanced typography and a minimalist display. WAP is still supported on the EDGE/GPRS interface (used also with the Internet protocol under 2G networks which works almost everywhere when 3G/4G/5G signals cannot be received). However don't expect using this for feature rich interaction including for sending cute "WAP pictograms" that these devices will anyway not be able to decipher and render. I bet that WAP pictograms was an early specification for test that was in fact never needed, because the target audience goal was better achieved with Internet protocols and encoding standards, but also no one really wanted to administer a registry for the names (see the death of pict.com: no one paying for it, specification redundant with classic URIs on the web for referencing images), or standardizing the glyphs.
The existing standard with normalized glyphs and semantics however exist, notably for traffic signs (on streets/roads, railways, rivers/canals, seas...), or in various industry standards (including for food, chemical products, or cleaning instructions for textiles, or additional glyphs for recycling, hazards or pollution). We are far from being complete in Unicode there, even if the supporting standards are effective, sometimes even mandatory, and very used. The problem for them is that these standards are not necessarily international, and incompatible with each other but still regulated and required and you cannot unify the glyphs specified by one of these standards with those from a competing standard (or with those glyphs already implemented in the UCS). And for now Unicode has resisted the idea of standardizing sets of symbols for specific standards, and notably if the glyphs are too strictly defined (not allowing variations/derivations without breaking the intended regulated semantics). 2017-01-07 5:12 GMT+01:00 Martin J. Dürst <[email protected]>: > On 2017/01/07 08:21, Christoph Päper wrote: > >> I just discovered the WAP Pictogram specification (WAP-213-WAPInterPic), >> last published in April 2001 and updated in November 2001. >> > > I haven’t found any reference or vendor-specific images, by the way, and >> if it wasn’t just used as an example domain anyway, pict.com seems now >> defunct. >> > > Isn't WAP overall pretty much defunct these days? > > (Well, many including me predicted as much pretty much when it first > showed up.) > > Regards, Martin. >
