Work With Wap
Work With Wap
You’d have had to have been living under a rock these last few months not to have at least heard of WAP. This irresistible acronym stands for the decidedly less sexysounding Wireless Application Protocol but WAP is currently being heralded as the next great leap forward because it lets people access the Net using nothing but a mobile phone.
Well sort of. It’s a little disingenuous to say WAP lets you surf the Web from your mobile because what you actually do is surf pages specially built for mobile phones that are hosted on the Net. You can’t access any site built in HTML on your phone you can only access pages built using HTML’s new baby sister WML Wireless Markup Language. As such if you want your home page to be visible to the mobile masses you’ll have to build another version of it in WML.
The good news is that WML is remarkably easy to pick up because its very similar to HTML using tags to define the various elements on the page. If you head over to Wapdrive you’ll find all the tools you need both to construct and view WAP pages and you don’t even need a WAP enabled mobile phone to do it. First off there’s the Wapalizer this lets you look at any WAP site through your Web browser rather than having to rush out and get yourself a Nokia 7110 or similar.
Simply type in the URL of a WAP site into the Wapalizer’s box and you’ll get a new window that has a mobile phone’s interface and lets you navigate through the pages just as you would on a phone. There are lots of other sites to check out in Yahoo!
Play your Cards Right
Once you’ve got to grips with how WAP pages actually function Wapdrive offers you three different ways to build your own WAP pages all without costing you a bean. The Waptor is a free WML editor that you can download to play with offline. The built in help is pretty basic but it’s easy to pick up if you’re used to WYSIWYG HTML editors.
The essential thing to remember is that pages are known as “cards” in WAP parlance. You’ll soon see why as you’ll only want to put 10 lines or so of info on each card otherwise navigating gets somewhat unwieldy.
While the Web may be a vast electronic library WAP’s limited bandwidth means it can only really be a Rolodex in comparison. Once you’ve built some cards and strung them together you can upload them to your normal Web space and have a crack at accessing them through the above mentioned Wapalizer. Of course if you’re really serious about providing a proper WAP service you’ll want to ensure they do actually work on a real mobile before you start promoting your new toy. If you prefer to take your introduction to WAP at a more sedate pace Wapdrive also offers a basic and advanced online WAP site building service.
You need to register to get access to this but it’s free and you get some free Web space to boot. With the basic WAP builder you simply insert the text you’d like to see on each card and the site does the rest for you in true WYSIWYG style. Essentially there’s not much else to do besides link between cards and insert the occasional image. Go on to the advanced version and you get to see and edit the actual WML code. Clever though these online tools are you’ll probably opt for using the offline Waptor pretty soon due to the inevitable slowness of making changes and saving pages.
WAP then like HTML is actually open to everyone to play with. Just as with HTML if you know your WML tags you only need a basic text editor like Notepad to create cards. However with WML content isn’t so much king as absolute overlord. WAP requires pure textual information and by necessity it has to be superbrief.
Certainly there will probably be some radical developments in the design of mobile phones within the next couple of years but its unlikely WAP will challenge the supremacy of HTML as the default medium of the Web. It’s shaping up to be a useful sidekick and if you can figure out a killer app for WAP on your Web site then you can plunge in and develop your own WAP pages without further ado. Just remember don’t call us we’ll call you.
About the writer:nbsp;nbsp;Subscribe to Sandra Priors Online Newsletter
and get up to date Computer Technology
News delivered right to your email box for free.
See website for details http://usacomputers.rr.nu and http://sacomputers.rr.nu.
Related posts:
