Welcome to the DevGuru WML Quick Reference guide. This is a unique 62-page reference source for all of the tags and attributes that compose the Wireless Markup Language (WML) version 1.2. This Quick Reference also includes real working code examples that were tested on the M3Gate version 0.4 Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) web browser simulator. (There are several such simulators available for free on the Internet.)
The concept of connecting a wireless (mobile) phone to the Internet has finally gone from being a pipe dream to Reality. As a consequence, the technology known as WAP is a very hot topic. WAP is used to create a Gateway that serves as a two-way intermediary connecting path Between the Internet and a mobile phone. The Gateway fetches the WML program from the remote server, compiles it, and sends the compiled byte stream to the wireless browser.
This is cutting-edge technology and there are definite limitations. Consider the "simple" HTML language which has been used to create billions of pages on the Internet. In fact, HTML is far too complex of a language to use to display content on a wireless phone viewing screen (constraints include memory size, processing power, and download time). The solution to this problem was to create the Wireless Markup Language in 1999. As a first approximation, WML can be considered to be a highly simplified, bare bones version of HTML, but a more appropriate approximation is that WML is a small language in XML.
WML is designed to allow the Static display of text, tables, hyperlinks, monochrome images, and input fields. The individual page is called a card, and a collection of these cards which are linked together is referred to as a deck. There is usually an upper size limit (typically ~1400 bytes compiled) for a card.
