LEAPing over WAP

A set of specifications called the Wireless Application Protocol, or WAP, exists already, and purports to do the same things that LEAP does. However, the WAP specifications are entirely unfit for their claimed purpose, and are doomed to technological and political failure. A detailed criticism of WAP and justification of these statements is provided in an article called The WAP Trap [66] within The LEAP Manifesto.

LEAP is an alternative to WAP, that does in fact what WAP does only in fiction. For a point-by-point comparison of LEAP to WAP, see the article entitled LEAP: One Alternative to WAP [64] within The LEAP Manifesto.

Those characteristics of WAP that make it wholly unfit to be the industry standard are summarized in Table 11.1, along with the corresponding characteristics of the LEAP protocols.

Table 2.1: WAP versus LEAP

WAP	LEAP
Subject to known patent restrictions	Patent-free
Self-published by the WAP Forum	Published as Internet RFCs
Revisions subject to change without notice	All revisions permanently fixed
Maintained by the WAP Forum	Maintained by open working groups
Re-invention of existing protocols	Efficiency-optimizing extensions to existing protocols
Tailored to mobile phone user interface characteristics	User interface independent
Inherent security vulnerability	Imposes no security assumptions
Inconsistent protocol number assignment	Consistent protocol number assignment
Poor technical design	Good technical design
Initial focus: web browsing	Initial focus: messaging
Treats wireless as a special case	Treats wireless as an extension of Internet