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http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2004/02/06/mobile_browsing.html
by Robert Jones
http://asp2.readspeaker.net/cgi-bin/oreillyrsone?lang=us&voice=Paul&customerid=171&url=http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/4598

02/06/2004
WAP, WML, and XHTML MP

WML it has been

superceded

XHTML MP (Mobile Profile).

WAP 2.0, an evolution of the delivery mechanism.

First

You must use double quotes around each attribute in a tag (such as align="center") and you must match each tag with a closing tag (such as

...
). That is, except for the tags that don't follow that rule, most notably
and . You have to write perfectly clean code or it will not be displayed on your phone. Trust me, this gets very frustrating very quickly.

Secondly,

you should install a WAP browser simulator on your PC. Simulators are essential tools for anyone developing content for phones. Running on your PC over a regular Internet connection, they load pages much faster than your phone, they avoid the frustrations of using the phone keypad, and they can provide information that helps debug problems. In fact, they are so useful that I recommend you install two of them!

The first, and easiest to install, is from Openwave and can be found at developer.openwave.com. It is available for Windows only and is free of charge, but you do need to register with Openwave. The equivalent software from Nokia is available from

forum.nokia.com. Drill down through Tools and SDKs until you find the page for Nokia Mobile Internet Toolkit 4.0. Again, the software is free, but you will need to register. You should download the entire toolkit, which includes a Mobile Browser Simulator (NMB), a WAP Gateway Simulator, and the toolkit itself (NMIT), which is an application containing editors for the markup languages, images, and multimedia messages. The simulators look like this :

The real benefit of installing the Nokia software is the NMIT, which provides "language-aware" editors for WML and XHTML MP. This is extremely useful in troubleshooting pages that do not display on your phone. Chances are the problem is XML-related, such as a failure to properly quote an attribute. This screenshot shows an example of that:

Robert Jones runs Craic Computing, a small bioinformatics company in Seattle that provides advanced software and data analysis services to the biotechnology industry. He was a bench molecular biologist for many years before programming got the better of him.