This sample chapter describes the evolution of WML and what it's about. It explains what WML can and can't do, provides a comparison to other markup languages, covers WML structure and syntax, and illustrates the essential WML elements and attributes used with all WAP applications.

DEITEL™ discusses the Wireless Markup language (WML), the markup language used to create presentational layer of WAP applications delivered to wireless handheld devices. This is the second article in a two-part series, which presents an introduction to WAP and WML. The first article introduced WAP and WML with a sample code example. Here in Part 2, we duplicate the example and incorporate the use of WMLScript.

When you navigate with the user agent's up and down arrow keys, the cursor moves from one entry field to another. You fill entries or modify them with the Options soft key. Let's assume an application that computes the number of mortgage payments. The entry card looks like this:

WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) is the de facto standard for creating applications that run on cell phones and other wireless devices. WML and WMLScript are the two languages used to write these applications.

With the popularity of mobile computing skyrocketing, being able to deliver content to cell phones, pagers, PDAs, and other mobile devices is becoming just as important! The Wireless Markup Language (WML) and the Handheld Device Markup Language (HDML) are two separate ways of providing Web-like content to mobile devices. Be sure to read these great resources to learn more!

I picked up a Pocket Mail (http://www.pocketmail.com) portable email device, and have since been working on various projects to get things done while I'm out of town. I've become quite a Slashdot addict while I'm actually in the office, but have missed the stories while traveling. They have a very good Palm interface that works great, but at the time of writing this code, it was not getting updated often. I did find, however, that their WML interface, which includes the stories in text format, was working fine.

WML was designed for low-bandwidth, small-display devices. As part of this design, the concept of a deck of cards was utilized. A single WML document (i.e. the elements contained within the document element) is known as a deck. A single interaction between a user agent and a user is known as a card. The beauty of this design is that multiple screens can be downloaded to the client in a single retrieval.

Some weeks ago I wrote a short item outlining how we had taken Somewherenear, a dynamic website and put a WML front-end on to it relatively quickly through the happy combination of an appropriate architecture and handy tools like php3. Several people got in touch with me after than and shared notes on their and my experiences of getting to grips with WAP and WML.

A WML code includes a header and a body. Here is the header of currency.wml as an example:

WML, the Wireless Markup Language, is the language adopted by members of the WAP Forum to deliver web content to wireless devices (by which we mean, mostly, cell phones). The language is a descendent of the Handheld Device Markup Language, itself a subset of HTML, based on the World Wide Web Consortium's Guidelines for Mobile Access.

In a previous article, we made our initial foray into XSLT and XPath, finishing with an example that demonstrated the transformation of XML into HTML. Now that we have seen the stylesheet for transforming XML into HTML, we can now look at how we can transform XML into WML.

Cellular phones supporting WAP are slowly, but constantly spreading. Therefore, it could be time for you to start building your WML pages to access internet databases. As such, we will show you how to build PHP/WML pages to access a MySQL database which contains professors' receiving hours and exams timetables for a University. I'm testing a beta service of this kind, prepared with Vitaveska Lanfranchi, at www.scidecom.it.

If you're living in the present day, in one of the thousands of metropolitan and quasi-metropolitan centers to which service has been rolled out, you've probably at some point seen someone with a mobile phone. They're little electronic things, just like the phones our ancestors had — but they don't need to be leashed to a wall! They are mobile!

Didier Martin leads us through building a portal accessible by HTML, WML, and VoiceXML. This week's article introduces the project and covers the login process."

Consultant and JSP author Chad Darby delivered a light overview of a hot topic to a packed room at XML DevCon in New York on Monday, "Developing Wireless Applications with WAP, WML, and JSP."