On Mon, 2003-09-08 at 13:31, Nick Rout wrote: > Can anyone point me to "the idiots guide to wap including the basic > wap-apache howto and a simple explanation for the beginner"? I have a > capable mobile phone, but nothing out there interests me. > > Now i'd like to be able to access my squirrelmail site over wap, just > for fun, but it might be handy too.
WAP is a horribly broken protocol and WML is a disgusting language, and phones don't implement any form of consistent standard of either. (pulling no punches ... I'll disclaim that I haven't done *any* hands-on work with WAP, but worked for a Vodafone company where WAP was one of the major services. The WAP developers were a pretty dejected bunch) WAP is a sort-of compressed HTTP. "Most" people don't bother to support WAP in their web servers, but rely on the telco to provide a WAP/HTTP gateway service. HTTP servers will happily hand out WML files, assuming mime-types is correct. WML is a sort-of compressed HTML, but has a paradigm of "cards" instead of "pages". Navigation is usually provided solely from the WML pages, because you can't rely on the handsets to implement *any* navigation. Not even cacheing :-) Having said all that, Opera supports rendering of WML, which makes it a decent "not paying for airtime" way of checking out your site. And you probably won't worry about implementing for anything except your existing handset :-) Anyway, I've only used mobile phones that implement IMAP directly, since the late 1990s. And HTTP. :-) -jim
