Move It or Lose It, WAP and WML
By Molly E. Holzschlag
Perhaps I'm reverting to childhood. Either that or I'm really just a child at heart. To me, wireless development and design feels like getting a new box of Lincoln logs or an erector set. I'm excited and ready to build all kinds of adventuresome things.
In the early days of my Web career—no doubt many readers will remember this, too—everything I created out of markup was done for a nonvisual Web. Mosaic was a year in the future, and the focus was on building logically organized Web pages with balanced content. Despite the impending shift to a graphic interface for the Web, sites were text-based.
Creating wireless pages is like reverting to childhood—it's creative and simple because in many cases, the design process is very similar to what I was doing in the Web's early days. Paradoxically, a few of the technical issues that designers and developers must anticipate in wireless design relate to more logical and complex methods and languages.
Begin with WAP
Every few years, a new acronym appears in technology news and creates a stir. It happened with HTML; it happened with XML. And in the last couple of years, it's been happening with WAP—the wireless application protocol. While WAP has, at least in its early years, been left to the wireless industry, it's becoming more interesting to the standard Web developer. This is particularly true for Web designers interested in developing for wireless devices. Inevitably, those individuals will encounter WAP information and want to know what WAP is.
