Ever wonder what this new W.A.P craze is all about, let us explain!

Why is WAP important for Internet Service Providers (ISPs)?

WAP will be the way people on the move will access information sources using a mobile phone device. If you are an ISP and you are aware of the mobile data forecasts, you might want to look into how WAP will change your industry and your business model. Your clients use you to access the Internet - whom will they use to access the WAP services of the future?

Using WAP

Using WAP is very simple, the same principles apply as to the traditional PC internet paradigm ( oh no, I've said paradigm, sorry ). At the receiving end, inside the mobile phone, there will be a browser, which will format the information sent, like a desktop browser does. There will also be a lot of technical wizardry and magic, which gets the information from where it's stored to the display screen; the phone manufacturer provides all this and the phone companies can be ignored.

Providing information content, which will be displayed on the mobile, is what we're interested in. To create information which can be viewed by desktop surfers we produce a number of HTML ( Hyper Text Markup Language ) files which contain the information we want to show and all the links we need to tie our various pages of information together.

It is exactly the same for WAP information except we use WML ( Wireless Markup Language ) instead of HTML. WML is very similar to HTML but also different. WML information must be formatted much more rigidly than HTML is and some of the markup language tokens, the words inside the < and > chevrons are different, however, the style of each is very broadly similar.

Indeed, WML is actually XML ( Extensible Markup Language ) forced to use a particular format, XML is also derived from HTML, however, its parentage has been hidden away, and it is not commonly thought of as being related to XML.

WML is used in a similar way to HTML; pages are created using a text editor, using the formatting and tokens available and then these files are placed on a server just as the HTML pages were. The only differences being the formatting and tokens within the file and the fact that WML files have the file extension .wml, not .htm, .html or .xml etc.

These files can then be downloaded by a mobile user through specifying the URL, that is the address, using the standard www dot something dot something, etc format. Viewing the WML files you have created is a bit of a problem, unless you want to keep uploading them to the server and then call them up using a WAP enabled mobile phone.

[Print Page | Next Page (4)]>>