All the latest Smartphones and PDAs come with WAP that enables access to the web pages on the move. Has support for multimedia.
WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) is a medium to bring internet content and services to mobile phones and other wireless devices. WAP, when initially introduced, touted as a revolution in mobile phone technology. It was expected to transform the whole concept of mobile computing. But then there were certain constraints like small screen, unreliable connections, limited bandwidth availability and limited device memory.
WAP has its own security model, is quite simple to use, is widely accepted and is standard independent, in the sense, that even if you switch to GPRS network, it would not really make a difference. WML (Wireless Markup Language) forms an integral part of the WAP architecture. WAP has gone through several minor revisions, WAP 2 being the first major revision since 1998.
There were numerous criticisms raised against WAP, saying that it does not use standard internet protocols, does not use a standard display markup language, does not mandate support for cookies and that it has a security hole. To address these issues WAP 2.0 was introduced.
WAP 2.0 is also called WAP-Next Generation (WAP-NG). It supports the standard Web protocol stack of HTTP/1.1, TCP and TLS. It uses WML to create the user interface of an application. It has CSS support, featuring only those aspects that are relevant to the mobile environment.
WAP 2.0 XHTML is the mobile version of XHTML 1.0. WAP browser requires a WAP gateway that acts as an intermediary between the internet networks and the mobile phones. It also translates WML to HTML and vice versa.
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