WAP 2.0 do-it-yourself: 1.2: History of Russian-language WAP [1 part].
All previous and future parts are available here.
As an annex to this chapter: Interviews with people, not without the participation of which WAP has become what it is
As one of the historians said, in my eloquent retelling: “Any history is subjective by definition. Only historical facts are objective, and their interpretation, which constitutes history, is the historian’s subjective opinion. ”I’d add that I tried to be as less subjective as possible - before writing this article I spoke with the administrators of several popular WAP resources, read a few subjective articles, in one of which it was said that there is no future for WAP, and in the other one it is diametrically opposite, but with an obvious advertisement of one of the resources - you can find all these articles using Google, we will try I look at WAP in different ways. So let's get started.
')
Of course, to say that WAP in Russia (and other CIS countries) appeared suddenly from the bay is not worth it - the first WAP (and then WAP 1.0) sites appeared back in 1998-1999. Naturally, these were the WAP sites of mobile operators. Access to WAP was then carried out only by CSD (if you go down to extremes, it is very similar to the Dial-up standard), it’s natural that the minute of such pleasure was quite expensive, but what to say about the 20th century - advertising-prospectus the MTS JEANS tariff for 2004 promised us a minute of work on the Internet costing at least 11 cents, that is, at that time - about 198 rubles per hour.
Thus, it was the CSD prices that hampered the development of WAP: in fact, it was only oilmen from Tomsk who could use it, and the young people could not and did not want the engine of progress (and even now for such money they would not) create and develop Russian WAP.
The boom of WAP development in many countries appeared after the introduction of GPRS technology: now the Internet did not clog the “telephone line”, and the data began to be transmitted in a “packet” mode. In 2001 in Russia, the “big two” (MTS, Beeline) began to introduce test (read free) GPRS, the only obstacle was that the phones themselves supporting this technology were not cheap, but still people began to assemble on the portals of operators - each had its own chats, unpretentious forums. At the same time, mobile versions of large WEB portals, such as Yandex, appeared, but they played the role of news broadcaster, essentially implementing only a minimum of WAP capabilities and not presenting any interactivity to users, and operators' WAP resources of a certain interest and a large number (by that measure) services have been closed to the outside world. People communicated, got acquainted, in time there appeared a desire to move away from services monopolized by operators.
The eye of the administrators of the future popular and not so wap-sites has fallen on the site designers that are popular in foreign WAP: tagtag.com , mywap.o2.co.uk . Everything would be fine, but these sites were English-speaking - read about Unicode did not even hear (we will talk about encodings later, now just note that Unicode, in particular, UTF-8 is a standard in WAP, and due to the fact that the first elements of the table UTF-8 correspond to the ASCII elements, the English-language sites were perfectly displayed on any browser, but non-ASCII text was already a problem - if the pages on the designers were saved in the correct encoding (which is rare), then it was given to the "krakozyabrami" the result of the first amateur (private) Russian-speaking Special sites had to communicate with the visitor via transliteration.
Over time, more and more wap-site builders began to get acquainted (someone - reading the specifications, and some by trial and error) with the WML markup language and post their creations on free hosting, such as nm.ru. Over time, due to a number of reasons (for example, the blocking on VmpelCom (trademark is Beeline) on the nm.ru ip subnet), the sites began to move to all sorts of designers, but already supporting the Russian language, the first of these was the wap constructor that appeared in 2003 . wapservis.ru , unfortunately, who surrendered their positions by 2005 and conceded to the present “Giants” - builder.wab.ru , kmx.ru and wen.ru.
The story of the emergence of wab.ru is closely related to the history of one very popular site - wap.myruk.ru . The author of this site was one of the chat users on the MTS portal - Muryk (Alexander Muradov). At that time, an interesting designer was “found” - tagtag.com (which I have already mentioned in passing). It is interesting because you can create sites from a computer - in a special application designer you can quickly “rivet” a site of a dozen pages and place it on some hosting or constructor, well, or press a button and place the site on tagtag.com , like Myruk and dozens of other newborn administrators of WAP sites entered. Myruk devoted quite a lot of time to his brainchild (initially - tagtag.com/mypuk ) and later decided to improve the lives of both themselves and users - to make a full-fledged “engine” for the site, what did Mance and Dizzy do, but later they stopped helping Alexander because that he did not share with them (and did not begin to share) the profit that the site began to bring. Mance and Dizzy decided to create their own portal - this is how wab.ru appeared, and myruk.ru eventually fell in the ratings.
At this time, “non-design” websites began to appear, giving at least some interactive user experience: this is how the chat wapchat.gala.net , which was very popular in 2003-2005, appeared . In addition to the sites "about everything", sites began to appear, the main theme of which is some kind of phone model or brand. So there were still popular: WAP version of the site siemens-club.ru and SEclub.org . The first one appeared at the beginning of 2003, as it is not difficult to guess, it is dedicated to the phones of the already “discarded skates” of the Siemens company, and the founding date of the second one is considered to be December 31, 2003 and its name is spelled as “Sony Ericsson Club”.
As for Siemens-Club , its initially technical forum has always occupied a special place in WAP: besides the sections devoted to siemens phones, the “Everything for the Phone” forum and its “WAP Resources” sub-forum stood out clearly. It is this subforum that can be called the “Forward of talents for ruWAP”: there, people understood how to triple WAP, “build” their own websites and learn the basics of programming for WAP. The section moderator was and is unnamed777, which, for the beloved forum, wrote FaQ on the basics of PHP, which many people studied (and not only from the sc forum) and to which they “sent” to get an answer to the question.
As I said, in the period from 2004 to 2005, the first "multifunctional" Russian-language WAP designers appear : builder.wab.ru , kmx.ru , wen.ru. We will talk about them in detail a little later, now we will say only that their appearance has greatly influenced the development of “ruWAP”: a sufficiently large number of Russian-language WAP sites began to appear. In general, the influence of designers is very ambiguous: on the one hand, quite a lot of interesting resources have appeared, which are fairly easy to maintain using only the telephone; on the other hand, there was a mass of sites - clones, and over time - thousands of sites consisting of one page, on which there is nothing other than links to paid content. In any case, the Russian-language WAP designers have made it possible for a large number of people to have a hobby that some have turned into something more.
I really like the opinion of the kmx.ru administration, which I will quote completely: “If you have reached a level when the designer’s capabilities are not enough at all, then you can safely create a site on a full-fledged hosting, and we will consider our mission of familiarizing you with wap performed. Such a position is the best, and if we consider the role of designers exactly as “joining a wap,” most of the designers regularly performed and are fulfilling their mission, for which they thank you (I will use the “official position”: thank you, kmx.ru - it is him and the forum. sc.ru helped me at the initial stage and it means that thanks to these two resources, I have grown to write this book).
The introduction of GPRS in Russia was in the form of a wave - by entering and testing GPRS in one region, a traffic charge was introduced and time-free GPRS came to another region, repeating the experience of the previous one, for example, Beeline first introduced a tolerable subscription fee of $ 3, and later - at the end 2004 - a fee for GPRS-WAP traffic. Prices have not changed much since then. For the sake of economy, "knowledgeable people" began to create "alternative ip", that is, to raise their own WAP-gates. Data transmission was carried out via GPRS-Internet, the prices for which are several times less. At the moment, the need for WAP-gates gradually disappears, as more and more mobile browsers support a direct connection via GPRS-Internet.
___________________________
PS Writing this chapter was not such a simple task and I decided to divide it into two parts, in the second part I will try to talk about the "formation" of domestic designers, hosting, in general terms about the development of profitable administrators of sites "affiliate programs", and the current situation affairs
As an annex to this chapter: Interviews with people, not without the participation of which WAP has become what it is
History of Russian WAP
Introduction
As one of the historians said, in my eloquent retelling: “Any history is subjective by definition. Only historical facts are objective, and their interpretation, which constitutes history, is the historian’s subjective opinion. ”I’d add that I tried to be as less subjective as possible - before writing this article I spoke with the administrators of several popular WAP resources, read a few subjective articles, in one of which it was said that there is no future for WAP, and in the other one it is diametrically opposite, but with an obvious advertisement of one of the resources - you can find all these articles using Google, we will try I look at WAP in different ways. So let's get started.
')
Of course, to say that WAP in Russia (and other CIS countries) appeared suddenly from the bay is not worth it - the first WAP (and then WAP 1.0) sites appeared back in 1998-1999. Naturally, these were the WAP sites of mobile operators. Access to WAP was then carried out only by CSD (if you go down to extremes, it is very similar to the Dial-up standard), it’s natural that the minute of such pleasure was quite expensive, but what to say about the 20th century - advertising-prospectus the MTS JEANS tariff for 2004 promised us a minute of work on the Internet costing at least 11 cents, that is, at that time - about 198 rubles per hour.
Thus, it was the CSD prices that hampered the development of WAP: in fact, it was only oilmen from Tomsk who could use it, and the young people could not and did not want the engine of progress (and even now for such money they would not) create and develop Russian WAP.
Pv-wap development boom
The boom of WAP development in many countries appeared after the introduction of GPRS technology: now the Internet did not clog the “telephone line”, and the data began to be transmitted in a “packet” mode. In 2001 in Russia, the “big two” (MTS, Beeline) began to introduce test (read free) GPRS, the only obstacle was that the phones themselves supporting this technology were not cheap, but still people began to assemble on the portals of operators - each had its own chats, unpretentious forums. At the same time, mobile versions of large WEB portals, such as Yandex, appeared, but they played the role of news broadcaster, essentially implementing only a minimum of WAP capabilities and not presenting any interactivity to users, and operators' WAP resources of a certain interest and a large number (by that measure) services have been closed to the outside world. People communicated, got acquainted, in time there appeared a desire to move away from services monopolized by operators.
The eye of the administrators of the future popular and not so wap-sites has fallen on the site designers that are popular in foreign WAP: tagtag.com , mywap.o2.co.uk . Everything would be fine, but these sites were English-speaking - read about Unicode did not even hear (we will talk about encodings later, now just note that Unicode, in particular, UTF-8 is a standard in WAP, and due to the fact that the first elements of the table UTF-8 correspond to the ASCII elements, the English-language sites were perfectly displayed on any browser, but non-ASCII text was already a problem - if the pages on the designers were saved in the correct encoding (which is rare), then it was given to the "krakozyabrami" the result of the first amateur (private) Russian-speaking Special sites had to communicate with the visitor via transliteration.
Over time, more and more wap-site builders began to get acquainted (someone - reading the specifications, and some by trial and error) with the WML markup language and post their creations on free hosting, such as nm.ru. Over time, due to a number of reasons (for example, the blocking on VmpelCom (trademark is Beeline) on the nm.ru ip subnet), the sites began to move to all sorts of designers, but already supporting the Russian language, the first of these was the wap constructor that appeared in 2003 . wapservis.ru , unfortunately, who surrendered their positions by 2005 and conceded to the present “Giants” - builder.wab.ru , kmx.ru and wen.ru.
The story of the emergence of wab.ru is closely related to the history of one very popular site - wap.myruk.ru . The author of this site was one of the chat users on the MTS portal - Muryk (Alexander Muradov). At that time, an interesting designer was “found” - tagtag.com (which I have already mentioned in passing). It is interesting because you can create sites from a computer - in a special application designer you can quickly “rivet” a site of a dozen pages and place it on some hosting or constructor, well, or press a button and place the site on tagtag.com , like Myruk and dozens of other newborn administrators of WAP sites entered. Myruk devoted quite a lot of time to his brainchild (initially - tagtag.com/mypuk ) and later decided to improve the lives of both themselves and users - to make a full-fledged “engine” for the site, what did Mance and Dizzy do, but later they stopped helping Alexander because that he did not share with them (and did not begin to share) the profit that the site began to bring. Mance and Dizzy decided to create their own portal - this is how wab.ru appeared, and myruk.ru eventually fell in the ratings.
At this time, “non-design” websites began to appear, giving at least some interactive user experience: this is how the chat wapchat.gala.net , which was very popular in 2003-2005, appeared . In addition to the sites "about everything", sites began to appear, the main theme of which is some kind of phone model or brand. So there were still popular: WAP version of the site siemens-club.ru and SEclub.org . The first one appeared at the beginning of 2003, as it is not difficult to guess, it is dedicated to the phones of the already “discarded skates” of the Siemens company, and the founding date of the second one is considered to be December 31, 2003 and its name is spelled as “Sony Ericsson Club”.
As for Siemens-Club , its initially technical forum has always occupied a special place in WAP: besides the sections devoted to siemens phones, the “Everything for the Phone” forum and its “WAP Resources” sub-forum stood out clearly. It is this subforum that can be called the “Forward of talents for ruWAP”: there, people understood how to triple WAP, “build” their own websites and learn the basics of programming for WAP. The section moderator was and is unnamed777, which, for the beloved forum, wrote FaQ on the basics of PHP, which many people studied (and not only from the sc forum) and to which they “sent” to get an answer to the question.
As I said, in the period from 2004 to 2005, the first "multifunctional" Russian-language WAP designers appear : builder.wab.ru , kmx.ru , wen.ru. We will talk about them in detail a little later, now we will say only that their appearance has greatly influenced the development of “ruWAP”: a sufficiently large number of Russian-language WAP sites began to appear. In general, the influence of designers is very ambiguous: on the one hand, quite a lot of interesting resources have appeared, which are fairly easy to maintain using only the telephone; on the other hand, there was a mass of sites - clones, and over time - thousands of sites consisting of one page, on which there is nothing other than links to paid content. In any case, the Russian-language WAP designers have made it possible for a large number of people to have a hobby that some have turned into something more.
I really like the opinion of the kmx.ru administration, which I will quote completely: “If you have reached a level when the designer’s capabilities are not enough at all, then you can safely create a site on a full-fledged hosting, and we will consider our mission of familiarizing you with wap performed. Such a position is the best, and if we consider the role of designers exactly as “joining a wap,” most of the designers regularly performed and are fulfilling their mission, for which they thank you (I will use the “official position”: thank you, kmx.ru - it is him and the forum. sc.ru helped me at the initial stage and it means that thanks to these two resources, I have grown to write this book).
The introduction of GPRS in Russia was in the form of a wave - by entering and testing GPRS in one region, a traffic charge was introduced and time-free GPRS came to another region, repeating the experience of the previous one, for example, Beeline first introduced a tolerable subscription fee of $ 3, and later - at the end 2004 - a fee for GPRS-WAP traffic. Prices have not changed much since then. For the sake of economy, "knowledgeable people" began to create "alternative ip", that is, to raise their own WAP-gates. Data transmission was carried out via GPRS-Internet, the prices for which are several times less. At the moment, the need for WAP-gates gradually disappears, as more and more mobile browsers support a direct connection via GPRS-Internet.
___________________________
PS Writing this chapter was not such a simple task and I decided to divide it into two parts, in the second part I will try to talk about the "formation" of domestic designers, hosting, in general terms about the development of profitable administrators of sites "affiliate programs", and the current situation affairs
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/52373/
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