On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, Nick May wrote:
> Thank you for this. What I am really trying to get at is not so much
> the "typing in the code" element, but the overall impact on a largish
> project of using wml rather than imode-html - which is a slightly
> wider notion.
>
> Is there none at all now ?
My last experience with WML was when a dot-com I happened to be working
for did mobile versions of an existing site. The i-Mode version was
pretty much a doddle; it took very little effort. The WML version
took about 5 times as much effort for a lot of different reasons:
documentation availability, difficulty of testing, a different method of
navigation, less ability to to re-use existing HTML generation code, and
so on.
Certainly in neither case did the development cost approach even
5% of the total project cost, but after a while we dropped WML and
kept i-Mode, because we needed far more WML customers to cover the
development and maintenance effort, but i-Mode was cheap and easy to
maintain.
Also, I should point out that comparing it to total project cost is not
the way it's looked at by the folks making the decisions about what the
programming team will work on. Assuming that the development (excluding
testing not done by programmers) is 20% of the total cost, and the
rest goes into research, testing, marketing, promotion, etc., what is
a mere 1% of the total project cost balloons to 5% of your programming
resources. And of course there are never enough programming resources.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.NetBSD.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
Received on Thu Oct 9 07:09:34 2003