Building WAP Services
XML And ASP Will Set Your Free
By Luca Passani
Over the past few months, I've taken part in a project that involved creating Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) services for a big Scandinavian telecommunication company. WAP is a new protocol that will turn mobile telephones into small Internet browsers. Thanks to HTTP and the WAP Forum's adoption of an HTML-like authoring language called Wireless Markup Language (WML), Web developers will be first in line to build WAP services.
Many WAP applications will simply be smaller versions of existing Web services. The real challenge with WAP will be to support those new WAP clients without producing or maintaining multiple versions of a site's content.
In this article, I'll show you how XML/XSL transformation can help you support new WAP features elegantly. If you're unfamiliar with WAP and WML, you'll want to read this article's sidebars to get some technical background. See "The WML Language" and "WAP in a Nutshell."
New Challenges for Web Developers
A religious war has been raging since 1996 between two groups. One camp insists on producing a unique version of each HTML page to run with each of the different browsers. The other group has given up on the idea, and uses server-side techniques to tweak pages dynamically for different user agents.
There are advantages and disadvantages with each approach. XML and server-side XSL transformations attempt to offer documents in multiple formats without maintaining multiple versions of the content.
