Wireless Markup Language
Wireless Markup Language (WML), based on
WML history
Building on Openwave's
The first company to launch a public WML site was Dutch mobile phone network operator Telfort in October 1999 and the first company in the world to launch the Nokia 7110. The Telfort WML site was created and developed as side project to test the device's capabilities by a billing engineer called Christopher Bee and National Deployment Manager, Euan McLeod. The WML site consists of four pages in both Dutch and English that contained many grammatical errors in Dutch as the two developers were unaware the WML was configured on the Nokia 7110 as the home page and neither were native Dutch speakers.
WML markup
WML documents are XML documents that validate against the WML DTD (
For example, the following WML page could be saved as "example.wml":
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml_1.1.xml" >
<wml>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
</head>
<card id="main" title="First Card">
<p mode="wrap">This is a sample WML page.</p>
</card>
</wml>
A WML document is known as a "deck". Data in the deck is structured into one or more "cards" (pages), each of which represents a single interaction with the user.
WML decks are stored on an ordinary
WML has a scaled-down set of procedural elements, which can be used by the author to control navigation to other cards.
Mobile devices are moving towards allowing more XHTML and even standard HTML as processing power in handsets increases. These standards are concerned with formatting and presentation. They do not however address cell-phone or mobile device hardware interfacing in the same way as WML.
WML capability in desktop browsers
The
Criticism
See also
- WMLScript
- Wireless Application Protocol Bitmap Format
- Mobile browser
- List of document markup languages
- Comparison of document markup languages
- XHTML Mobile Profile
References
- ^ The HCI blog: A brief History of WAP
- ^ WAP Forum: "Wireless Markup Language (WML) 2.0 Document Type Definition"
- ^ Openwave Developer Network: "One quick note about WML 2.0"
- ^ WAP Forum: "Wireless Markup Language (WML) 1.3 Document Type Definition"