WAP and websites

[kapow]

What is required to set a site up for WAP?
- Do many people use it?
- Does it require another version of the site designed for wap?
- Does it require special hosting?

[ukgimp]

The delivery of the information is via WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) and you need to use WML (wirless markup language) which is based on XML (extensible markup languge).

So I suppose you have to write your site in XML then at the top there is a request object that determines if the browser is web or phone based and if phone then it presents the slimmed down version for the phone.

To learn all this you will need to get to grips with XML, and XSL style sheets.

[Crazy_Fool]

>>What is required to set a site up for WAP?
A server with the correct mime types for WAP and a knowledge of WML programming. WML is the language WAP pages are written in (although can be written in XML as well). You can use PHP / Perl / ASP etc with WML just the same as you would use them with HTML to send emails, communicate with a database, and so on.

>>- Do many people use it?
I host a lot of WAP sites and yes, they seem well used, but I've really only glanced at the stats.

>>- Does it require another version of the site designed for wap?
If your site is in XML, then build the one site - tricky but possible. If it's in HTML, build a separate site in WML or convert to XML. You need to bear in mind that WAP phones only hold small amounts of data at a time, so therefore WML pages etc (decks / cards) have to be much smaller than your average web page. I think I read a limit somewhere of 1.6k being the maximum size that a particular Nokia phone could hold, while other phones could hold slightly more. (don't quote me on that - it was a while back!)

>>- Does it require special hosting?
The server needs the correct MIME types - most Windows / Linux / Unix servers these days have them set up as standard. If not, you can add the mime types in *nix servers in your .htaccess file using AddType.