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WAP: The Web for Cellphones and PDAs

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WAP specialties

Why do we need yet another set of standards? Because adaptations for wireless devices were necessary to accomodate their own set of special characteristics, namely:

1. Limited bandwidth
2. High latency
3. Limited device memory and processing power
4. Limited screen real estate

How do the WAP components compare with their Internet siblings?

• WML is quite limited compared to HTML - it only supports very basic text formatting and layout. This is deemed adequate for cellphone displays, which are usually monochrome and have about 6 lines with 20 characters each.
• Input methods are limited to edit fields and option selections, taking into account the limited suitability of keypads for large data entry tasks.
• WMLScript's object model is much simpler than DHTML's, adapting to the limited processing power and memory available on cellphones.
• WML can aggregate multiple pages, dubbed "cards", into so-called "decks" sent to the client browser in one batch. This helps to minimise server roundtrips on high-latency cellular networks.
• Both WML and WMLScript have an equivalent byte code representation, for reduced network load and memory consumption, also eliminating the need for a WML parser in the device.

WAP pages are accessed with URLs just like Web pages, and their content can either be original WML or translated from HTML, a function which is usually incorporated into the WAP gateway. As we will see later, the whole request-response process is very similar to that of the Web, with the gateway acting as a proxy between the telecom and computer networks.

Let's look at an example.

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Created: May 23, 2000
Revised: May 23, 2000