Wireless Connections: WAP

Heard of WAP? If you're a mobile phone user, you're going to be hearing a lot more about it!

WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) is, essentially, a technology which will allow your mobile phone to browse the Web. It's a protocol for the transmission of data over low bandwidth wireless networks.

It is implemented as two key components: the WAP Gateway and the mirco-browser. Together these enable mobile phones to interact with the rest of the Internet. The gateway connects phones to the Internet, whilst the micro-browser uses an XML document format, the Wireless Mark-Up Language (VML), to display pages.

The key to WAP is the gateway. This acts as a proxy, interpreting requests from phone micro-browsers and retrieving content via stnadrd HTTP requests. If you're already running Web servers you won't need to change them to deliver WAP applications - though you will need to translate your HTML and redesign your pages using VML.

A WAP gateway will compile VML pages for more efficient transmission to a mobile phone. It's probably best to think of a WAP gateway as a specialised form of Internet proxy, similar to familiar Web proxies and caches.

The micro-browser is implemented in a mobile handset, and is designed to handle WML code using the phone's standard interface. As a result, displays are three or four lines, and interfaces will vary from manufacturer to manufacturer and phone to phone,

The micro-browser needs to work in the limited memory and processor space of a mobile phone, so don't expect it to be as sophisticated as Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator!

A better comparison will be the early tier 1 frameless and table-less browsers, or the Lynx text-only browser.

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