WAP FAQ

1.1 In short, what is WAP?

WAP stands for Wireless Application Protocol. The idea comes from the wireless industry, from companies such as Nokia and Ericsson. It is based on existing internet technology such as XML and IP. The point of this standard is to serve internet contents and internet services to wireless clients, WAP devices, such as mobile phones and terminals.

Do not think of WAP as a single protocol. WAP is a long list of protocols and specifications which covers everything from how the WAP device and the user agent (the browser) should work, to how the transport protocols interact with the bearers such as GSM.

Many sites contain information about WAP, but the only authoritative source for WAP is The WAP Forum. However, the information released by the WAP Forum is very technical and might be difficult to read for those new to WAP.

One IMPORTANT thing to remember is that WAP is currently in its infancy - it has just been born. If you're from the HTML world, think back at how the first versions of NCSA's Mosaic browser looked. WAP has unfortunately been plagued by hype. Brainless marketing people have been selling WAP as "surf the web on your mobile telephone", and now we have "techno" journalists with even less brain slagging WAP off left, right and center because it turned out that their mobile phone didn't look like Netscape or Internet Explorer after all.

Do not despair! The mobile internet definitely has a future. It might not look exactly like WAP does today, but WAP is a very good start, and the people who are developing WAP are not marketing people and journalists.

1.2 In short, what is WML?

WML stands for Wireless Markup Language, and is what HTML is to a normal web browser. One could say that it is based on XML, but it's more correct to say that WML is an XML application. Although similar in syntax to HTML, it is much more like XML. If you're going from HTML to WML, with no prior knowledge of XML, chances are you'll find WML *very* strict. Just like HTML, WML is read and interpreted by a browser built into the WAP device which renders information on a display. For WAP devices, the browser or user agent is commonly called a micro browser. The capabilities of the micro browser is of course limited to the capabilites of the WAP device.

The reason WML is used instead of the more widely used HTML is because of how WAP works and how WAP is built to fit the "narrow" wireless world. WML is also tokenized or compressed before it is sent to the WAP device. Rendering a HTML page in your Netscape, Opera or Internet Explorer takes quite a bit of processing power. A WAP device does not have and does not need this processing power. Processing power in turn means electric energy which in the mobile world comes from batteries.

You might think that WML is very basic, maybe too basic, in that it does not handle the multimedia types of the HTML world. This is not the case. The markup language (WML, HTML etc) that limits if a device can play sounds or show animations. Look closely at HTML and you'll find that there are no HTML tags for showing animations or play music. The limit lies in the device the browser runs on. We are after all, at least most of the time, talking about mobile telephones. However, you should expect such limits to fade away as the wireless internet matures.