The Mobile Developer

Will WAP Complicate Our Lives?

I'm currently reading Steve Mann's book Programming Applications with the Wireless Application Protocol, which is a good introduction to WAP and certainly easier to digest than the Official Wireless Application Protocol hardcover reference that is sitting on my shelf. I thought it would be a good idea to figure out what all the fuss is about and if and how WAP will affect me.

My first thought, I must admit, is that WAP complicates my life. If you're involved with creating Web content, whether it be web pages or web applications, WAP is going to add yet another twist to your job. Forget about worrying if your users are using Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer, now you're going to have to worry about cellphone and other mobile users accessing your site via their WAP microbrowsers. All that carefully crafted HTML and JavaScript won't do them much good.

I'm not going to worry about it, you say, because the gateways will handle it all for me. Maybe. There's no doubt that gateways will be able to transform vanilla HTML into WML, the WAP markup language, because they're both SGML derivatives and WML looks a lot like HTML. The same is true for vanilla JavaScript, since WMLScript, the WAP equivalent, is derived from it.

The problem I see is that it's very rare for websites to use vanilla HTML or JavaScript. Even the simplest site, for example, uses HTML tables to lay out its elements. The Web Style Guide by Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton (a great resource, by the way) states it quite simply: "Tables are currently the only HTML option for page layout." With tables you can ensure that no line goes beyond a certain length. You can also carefully position images and related text relative to the main part of a page. There's a fundamental assumption that you're dealing with about 500 pixels of horizontal space, and some websites are even going beyond that. Cellphones simply don't have this kind of display space.

If the gateway can't do a good job of transforming your website, then you'll have to do it yourself. Maybe not now -- the critical mass isn't there, at least in North America. But it will arrive at some point, so you might as well start thinking about it. If you want to address the two sets of users, you'll need to effectively build two websites, one for WAP users and one for non-WAP users. This is why I think WAP complicates my life.

Of course, not all complications are bad. Some will see this as an opportunity to develop tools to deal with the dual-view problem. Maybe you'll end up programming in WML and WMLScript and run your code through a tool to transform it to HTML and JavaScript. I'm sure such a tool would produce a useable web page, but would it look as good as a "native HTML" page? Probably not.

There's a Chinese curse that goes something like this: May you have an interesting life. With WAP, things are bound to be interesting.