WEB MEDIA SCHOOL session - 70 What is WAP?
(PAW= Personal Anywhere Web - Accessories designed to get you on the web with your handheld.PALM NULL MODEM ADAPTERS Connects your cell phone data cable to your Palm device. These handy Adapters let you connect your Cell Phone's 9 pin Data Cable to your Palm Hand held for an easy connection to surf the web, send and receive emails, send and receive fax, SMS, WAP and more. (Check wiith your phone carrier and ISP for availability) ... $14.95 at http://www.pawgo.com/desktop/shop.html
WAP is a new protocol that will turn mobile telephones into small Internet browsers to "serve Internet contents and Internet services to wireless clients, WAP devices include mobile phones and terminals."
A research by Strategis Group implies that there will be at least 530 million mobile phone users by the year 2001. The billion mark will be reached by 2004. Services and applications will grow with the same speed as the Internet did in the mid-nineties. As mobile phones become increasingly popular, you can be sure that one of the greatest innovations in the upcoming decade will be the introduction of WAP (Wireless Application Protocol).
The limit of WAP today is plain text with some simple styling like bold and italics, but only on some devices. Monochrome images on displays that are typically 100 by 40 pixels. No audio, and no animations. A WML page is basically to a mobile phone what an HTML page is to an Internet browser - it contains the code that lets the browser know what you want displayed on the screen. For WAP information except we use WML (Wireless Markup Language) nstead of HTML.
HOW WAP WORKS. - If you want your WAP-compatible device to show any WML pages you obviously must request the page from a web server. Because of the restrictions of cellular phones, PDAs and all other mobile devices, the data can't be transferred directly from the server. WML pages are first sent to a WAP gateway. The WAP gateway has the responsibility to change the binary-coded request into an HTTP request and then sends it to the Web server. The Web server will now send the WML page to the WAP gateway, which will encode the data into binary WML and send it to your WAP compatible device.
HOW DO I CREATE A WML PAGE? - The WML code is much more strict than HTML code, meaning that you must follow the formatting rules, or you simply won't be able to display it. There's no room for error.A text editor is all you need to create a WAP page, but you'll find that using a developer toolkit can save you lots of time until you get used to the WAP environment. On this page you can find some useful links to WAP tools and WAP browsers: http://www.trendhosting.com/wap.html. If you are already creating HTML pages most of this process will probably be familiar to you.
HOW DO I SERVE WML CONTENTS? - You can serve WML documents from any normal web server. This means it is easy to make your own WAP hosting system using any regular server (eg. Apache). One very important thing is that you remember to tell the HTTP server to tell the WML browser that it is receiving WML pages, and not HTML pages. This is done by using something called MIME Types. The common MIME type for a plain HTML document is "text/html". The common MIME type for a plain WML document is "text/vnd.wap.wml". You may wish to read the tutorial on serving WAP documents at: http://www.wapdesign.org.uk/server.html.
BENEFITS - The WAP-based services are global, easy to use and offer improved security. And because WAP and Web tools are similar, it is relatively straightforward to adapt existing web applications to the mobile environment.Mobile operators and content providers will be able to develop new differentiated services to attract new users, so that users will benefit from a wider choice of mobile applications, advanced services, and Internet Access. End users of WAP will benefit from easy, secure access to relevant Internet information and services such as unified messaging, banking, and entertainment through their mobile devices.
FUTURE - WAP provides a markup language and a transport protocol that open the possibilities of the wireless environment and give players from all levels of the industry the opportunity to access an untapped market that is still in its infancy. Only time will tell how useful WAP becomes. The mobile phone companies and the service providers who are knocking up WAP content services at present appear to be backing it and, whether it is tweaked in the future or not, it looks like WAP is here, like it or not.
This article was written by Matthew Zupanec, the founder of
http://www.trendhosting.com - low cost WAP and WEB hosting.
The site ended up with a three-level architecture. The top level is a simple category reference. This links to level 2, which presents headlines and article descriptions. These link to the third level, complete stories.
Level 1: Site map
Level 2: Categorical headline index
Level 3: Full story
Having decided on the form of the content, the next step was to determine the balance between the volume of information and the medium. Wired News publishes loads of original stories throughout the day, too many to fully appreciate on a PDA. There was no justification for publishing the entire site for PalmPilot users. Remember that too little content limits the value to the user while too much content hogs palm-computer resources and increases synch time. Initially we aimed for a 50-KB site but then found that publishing a few more stories struck a better balance. We settled for 16 stories per synch or about 65 KB including images, a significant content offering with a reasonable download tariff of about 40 seconds via a 14.4-Kbps modem. (I synch at work on a T-1 in less than 10 seconds.)
From a production standpoint, the number of stories is limited using a Perl CGI script, which draws from the same data repository used by the Wired News Web site. We had the added challenge of removing the off-site links that frequently appear in stories. Otherwise, a user might click to pages that haven't been crawled by AvantGo. We used regular expression matching for this task.
Were you reading this article on a PalmPilot, you'd be on page 23 by now. The PalmPilot screen is the smallest of all palm-sized computers at 160 by 160 pixels. After browser software drops in a title bar and scroll bar, only 150 by 140 pixels remain. That space is precious and should be treated accordingly. There are a few tenets to hold dear through the design phase: Minimize clutter, keep pages short, and use simple images. Rather than go over it all here, I recommend a visit to AvantGo HTML Style Guide or Microsoft's PC Mobile Channels Design Guidelines. These publications detail layout considerations, image production, and HTML support. Keep it simple. Black and white is best (or at least high contrast), and remove all unessential HTML.
The secret of PalmPilot content is that there's not much to it. Take a look at the Web version of the Wired News palm-sized site here. Shrink your browser to about the size of a PalmPilot screen for the best results. At the time this was created, HTML support was minimal for the AvantGo browser. I couldn't use <FONT>, let alone <FORM> or <MAP>, and <I> rendered as bold. I used only <P>, <B>, <BLOCKQUOTE>, and <IMG>, with simple tables and spacer GIFs to control layout. I could have also used <H1> to render a large font or <PRE> to control space. This minimalist HTML palette is well suited to the task, though I appreciate the recent inclusion of <FORM> support.
Let's say you don't have the 14 most popular PDAs available for testing. In fact, you don't even have one. This is a problem, because testing requires seeing your work working in the intended medium. Fortunately, there are some work-arounds for people without a pile of PDAs. For Wired News, I was developing specifically for the PalmPilot, so I downloaded the Palm OS Emulator (POSE). POSE is a desktop application that looks and works like a PalmPilot. It was originally dubbed CoPilot by creator Greg Hewgill. In early 1998, 3Com's Palm Computing group took over the development of the emulator and added debugging features and support for newer versions of the software. There may be emulators for other platforms; however, since PalmPilots have the smallest screens, the POSE environment could be considered the lowest common denominator for PDA design.
I was able to publish and tweak test batches of news content and then load them into the AvantGo software installed on POSE to quickly view the effect of changes. This development environment offered the fastest way to see results; it was much faster than HotSync-ing my PalmPilot for each test. So, while publishing content for the palm space has its challenges, I'm excited to see that PDAs are allowing for the exploration of new and creative stagings for Web content. And while other mobile pioneers may have failed, I'm hoping that the PDA players don't let the promise of mobile media slip through their fingers.
.....FROM WEBMONKEY
On January 26th, 2000, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced the new standards for HTML. Surprisingly, it didn't go from HTML 4.0 to 5.0, but was the introduction to the XHTML 1.0. XHTML stands for eXtensible HyperText Markup Language and is meant to be the replacement for HTML. Although it is defined as an XML application, it is almost identical to HTML 4.01. What's wrong with the present HTML to warrant a change? Why did the keepers of the 'Net decide on XHTML instead of new tags for an HTML 5.0 version?Designers often write HTML code in a sloppy fashion. Web browsers are supposed to be very forgiving when rendering a page. In other words, they still try to display the page even if some tags are nested incorrectly or missing. This has led the browser developers to add extra code to the browser engine so that the pages still come out looking as they are supposed to look. However, all this code makes the browser a pretty big application, often between 15-18+ megs. Now this might be fine for your PC with all the hard drive space you may have. However, small devices such as PDAs, cell phones, etc., cannot hold such a big browser. Therefore, in order to be able to surf the web (and see your web site) with one of these devices, we need a small browser. In order to make the browser smaller the code must be less. That's where XHTML comes in. It forces website designers to create clean code by strictly enforcing what will be displayed and what will not. However, do not be put off by this because writing clean code will allow your pages to be seen by hundreds of thousands of people who use these small devices to surf the 'Net. The United States does not have nearly as many people surfing the 'Net with cell phones and handhelds as Europe. the huge percentage of young people who are using these small devices in ICELAND!! the reason the United States was behind Europe in surfing the 'Net with handhelds is because of the deregulation of Ma Bell, which fragmented the infrastructure of the phone system. This has not been the case in most of Europe; therefore, they are much more advanced in this endeavor than the United States. It is estimated that by the year 2002 as much as 75% of Internet access will be viewed by these devices. This prediction may or may not come true, but even at 30%-40%, that's still a lot of people.
Another reason that XHTML was introduced is because it allows builders to get used to some of the facets of XML but still use most of the HTML tags. Most people who have tried to work with XML understand its potential and power. However, most people generally resist change, and this is a good transition language. Additionally, while XHTML pagescan be viewed by today's browsers, most browsers cannot display XML. Of the major browsers, IE has been able to display XML pages and the latest version of Netscape 6.0 also has some built-in features to handle XML.
Although these are not all the rules you must follow to createXHTML documents, here are some of the major ones:
1) All tags must have a closing tag and be properly nested. Therefore, even tags such as the paragraph tag <p>, which is normally used singularly (without a closing tag) must now have one, i.e. </p>.2) All the elements of the document must be in lowercase. Therefore, the tag <Hr> or <HR> tag would be incorrect but <hr> would work. 3) All attribute values need to be in quotes. For example, <body bgcolor=white> is wrong but <body bgcolor="white"> would be correct. 4) All image tags must have an <alt> attribute. 5) All <style> tags must have the type attribute. 6) You must include <html>, <head>, <title>, and <body> tags, in that order. They must also be closed properly. Example of a simple XHTML page:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head> <title>On XHTML and Bears</title> </head>
<body>
<h1>The Three Bears </h1>
<a href = "http://www.WebProNews.com"> </a>
<p> Once upon a time, there were three bears:
A papa bear, a mama bear and a little, bitty
furry baby bear....
</p>
</body>
</html>
see how easy it is if you know HTML? Well, what is that stuff on the top of the document? This mumbo jumbo is the code that we have to have at the beginning of our XHTML documents. Lets examine this further:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
Since XHTML is defined as an XML app, we need to put that in to let the browser know that it is an XML document.
EXAMPLE:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
There is a big adoption from XML called a Document Type Definition (DTD). All a DTD is is a way of defining what is allowed and not allowed in your document. There are three types of DTDs that you can use with your XHTML document: Strict, Transitional, and Frameset. Strict - Use this when you want the presentation part separated from the structure of the document, such as using CSS to display the page.
EXAMPLE:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
Transitional - Use this when you need to have the presentation information within the page so that it won't cause browsers which don't support CSS to complain.
EXAMPLE:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
Frameset - Use this when you're using frames.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Frameset//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
As you may know, a DTD helps define what is going to be contained in the elements. Lack of space dictates that I can't cover DTDs in greater detail in this issue. Sometimes, as you get more sophisticated with XML, XHTML, or XSL documents, you might have it pointing to two different DTDs. The namespace (xmlns) is used to alleviate any confusion if you have two elements. To learn more about namespaces, check:
http://www.rpbourret.com/xml/NamespacesFAQ.htm#q1_1
In conclusion, XHTML makes it easy to make documents which can be seen by all kinds of new devices. Additionally, with a little studying, you can create much more powerful pages than ever before. Lastly, it is the bridge to XML...the future language of the Internet.
Places to Learn More About XHTML:
The Independent WAP/WML FAQ http://wap.colorline.no/wap-faq/
Catalogue of WAP Services for Users and Developers http://www.wapring.net/
Source for WAP Environment Specs
http://www.wapforum.org/
http://www.xhtml.org/
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/
http://wdvl.internet.com/Authoring/Languages/XML/XHTML/
http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/default.asp
http://www.mozquito.org/html/lang-english/why.html
http://www.DevWebPro.com/
WirelessProNews.com reports 18 million WAP users, 50 million WAP-enabled handsets shipped worldwide 12,000 WAP sites from over 100 countries 7.8 million WAP readable pages.Creating Web Pages For Phones, PDA's and Beepers
Wireless devices, like the new phones, PDA's and smart pagers, are growing in number as people may want to get information immediately no matter where they are. They may want: to check the weather, find a good restaurant, get directions to a movie theater, stock quotes and similar things like airline information. As useful and as popular as these devices are getting, there are a few considerations that need to be addressed that you don't have to worry about when making regular websites. Most of these "considerations" have to do with the fact that the thing is just so dagone small. It has small screens, little memory and CPU power and browsers which can't be too big. Additionally, they have low bandwidth problems. This all adds up to us as the code writers/developers having to be really strict with our code so that the browsers don't have to do too much interpretations of what you mean and can handle it. However we do need to know a couple of those dragonet acronyms, WAP and WML.
WAP
WAP stands for Wireless Application Protocol. A protocol is a set of rules which devices and developers need to follow in order to communicate with other similarly enabled systems or devices. In other words, they all need to follow the same rules in order to play the game. There are over 100 different protocols and WAP, a new one, was created for the wireless world. WAP was adopted by the leading body of this industry, the WAP Forum. The WAP Forum was started by some of the biggies of the phone world: Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson, and Unwired Planet. Therefore, a lot of the devices made by these companies are configured to work with this protocol. However, WAP, being an open standard and is network-independent, can work on top of any wireless protocols.
From a webmasters point of view, the WAP device has an IP address just like a laptop or a PC and sends information through the regular HTTP requests. However, the difference is that there is a WAP gateway between the server and the device which translates the code into a binary format (machine code) which makes it much lighter data when sending and receiving. The web server nor the receiving device knows, nor needs to know, anything about this gateway.
WML
WML stands for Wireless Markup Language. It is very similar to both, HTML and XML so if you know HTML, you'll have a easy learning curve with this language. I did want to mention that WML is the present language used advocated by the WAP Forum but they are moving toward using XHTML in their next generation WAP 2.0, also known as WAP NG with the "NG" standing for Next Generation. WML, like XHTML, is a bit stricter than HTML, so we don't have the option of forgetting about ending tags and stuff like that. So how's the language work?
Firstly, when you save the page, it is saved with an .wml extension instead of the .html one that we use with regular web pages.
Secondly, since making it as light as possible is the goal. WML documents are mostly about text with a few tags which correspond to our regular html tags.
Thirdly, in adopting policy from XML, which it is a part of, everything is case sensitive. So <WML> is different from <wml>
Fourth, we must have an ending tag for ALL our WML tags.
Now, when creating these pages, the popular analogy is to see the document(s) as a set of regular playing cards. In fact each little page that appears in the devices little browser is called a "card" and the entire .wml document is called a "deck". A deck as we mentioned earlier contains cards. Additionally, decks can also contain text, links, images, input fields etc. Furthermore, cards can be linked to each other. When the page is called by an Internet phone's browser, the entire deck is downloaded so that you can quickly navigate between cards. It would be best to see this analogy with a deck of cards facing you. You can see the top one and when you navigate to another card the browser quickly looks it up and displays it. By the wireless browser downloading the entire deck, the user doesn't have to worry about "latency" which is the amount of time the physical device takes to send and get information from the server.
Below are some of the mechanics of the language: The Prologue, is the first part of your WML article. It contains information for the browser to let them know what kind of document it is and where they can find the rules (DTD) for this document. It usually is:http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml_1.1.xml
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml_1.1.xml">
Line Space and Formatting Tags
<wml>
<card title="Horses">
<p>
Welcome!<br/>To the <u>wonderful</u> world of <i><b>Horses</b></i>!
</p></card>
</wml>
==========================
Here is an example of making a table in WML (This too is the same as HTML):
<wml>
<card title="TableofHorses"><p>
<table columns="3">
<tr>
<td>Thoroughbred Horses</td>
<td>Quarter Horses</td>
<td>Arabians</td>
</tr>
</table>
</p></card>
</wml>
==========================
<anchor>
When you use the anchor tag, you should use "go", "prev", or "refresh" tags to let the browser know what specific action to take.
<wml>
<card title="HorseLinks"><p>
<anchor>Thoroughbreds
<go href="thoroughbreds.wml"/>
</anchor>
<anchor>Arabians
<go href="arabians.wml"/>
</anchor>
<anchor>Paints
<go href="paints.wml"/>
</anchor>
</p></card>
</wml>
==========================
<a>
The <a> tag always performs a "go" task, with no variables. The example below does the same as the <anchor> tag example:
<wml>
<card title="Secretariat1"><p>
<a href="secretariat2.wml">More Information</a>
</p></card>
</wml>
==========================
Image
A WML card can be set up to display an image:
<wml>
<card title="Picofsecretariat"> <p>
Here is a picture of Secretariat
<img src="../images/Secretariat.wbmp" alt="Secretariat" />
in a paragraph
</p></card>
</wml>
==========================
Input Fields
Letting a user enter information
<wml>
card title="Input">
<p>
Name: <input name="Name" size="15"/><br/>
Age: <input name="Age" size="15" format="*N"/><br/>
Sex: <input name="Sex" size="15"/>
</p>
</card>
</wml>
==========================
Select and Option Tags for Forms
<wml>
<card title="Fastest Miler">
<p>
<select>
<option value="secretariat">Secretariat</option>
<option value="drfager">Dr. Fager</option>
<option value="spectacularbid">Spectacular Bid</option>
</select>
</p>
</card>
</wml>
==========================
Selecting More Than One Item
<wml>
<card title="Choose Your Favorite Breeds">
<p>
<select multiple="true">
<option value="arabians">Arabians</option>
<option value="quarters">Quarter Horses</option>
<option value="saddlebred">Saddlebreds</option>
</select>
</p>
</card>
</wml>
==========================
Fieldset
<wml>
<card title="HorseFieldsets">
<p>
<fieldset title="horse info">
Title: <input name="breed" type="text"/><br/>
Prize: <input name="name" type="text"/>
</fieldset>
</p>
</card>
</wml>
==========================
Go Tags allow you to change to the next page
<wml>
<card>
<p>
<anchor>
Next Page
<go href="nextpage.wml"/>
</anchor>
</p>
</card>
</wml>
==========================
Prev Task
Going back To The previous card
<wml>
<card>
<p>
<anchor>
Previous Page
<prev/>
</anchor>
</p>
</card>
</wml>
I'd like to thank the site www.w3schools.com from where I was able to learn about, and build, wireless pages. ....Peter Thiruselvam
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