Over the past decade, the Internet has moved from command line-oriented tools like telnet and ftp to the full-screen menu structure of gopher and finally to the graphical, massively hypertext-linked database that is the World Wide Web. Access to the burgeoning information resources on the Web was limited at first. After Internet access spread from academia and the government to the commercial and home realms, pundits predicted skyrocketing access costs and per-minute fees. Instead, we now see less expensive access and a plethora of free Internet access services. Today, it is not just the information professional who wanders the Web. It seems that everyone does, from school children to the retired, from Albania to Zambia. With all of this activity, change is constant, with new technologies on the rise as older ones show signs of age. In my own recent wanderings, a new acronym has been on the rise: WAP. WHAT IS WAP?WAP is the acronym for Wireless Application Protocol. It is an Internet protocol developed for transferring information on the Internet to and from wireless clients. These wireless clients can run on cellular phones, palm computing devices, and other small, portable terminals. At this point, cell phones are the primary WAP devices. Protocol details and more information about the developing standard are available at the WAP Forum (www.wapforum.org).One of the main WAP issues has less to do with the wireless aspect than it does with the display limitations. Think of most Web pages that you view. Even on the simple, clean layouts, most Web pages have a great deal of text, graphics, and other information packed on a single page. With a WAP device, the screen real estate is greatly reduced. Some of the Internet-enabled cell phones have three lines of 12 characters each. Not all such devices have that limited a display, but compared even to a 640 x 480 screen resolution on older desktop or laptop computers, the WAP display space is extremely small. On top of the display problem is the input difficulty. There is no QWERTY keyboard on a cell phone. Instead, they offer the 10-number pad with three letters corresponding to each number of an ordinary telephone. Orktopas (a purposeful--sort of--misspelling of Octopus) offers basic information and pictures of several different WAP devices from a variety of WAP manufacturers (http://www.orktopas.com/otpdevice.htm). WML FOR WAPHTML has worked quite well for Web page layout, despite all the complaints and additions. However, it does not work as well on the tiny WAP screens. For that reason, the Wireless Markup Language (WML) has been created for use on WAP devices. WML is based on eXtensible Markup Language (XML). A regular Web browser reads HTML but not XML. A WAP browser reads WML but not HTML. Thus, one important point for the information professional is that WAP and WML are creating a new information space on the Internet. WAP overlaps with the Web, but it is not exactly the same.THE WML INFO SPACEAt this point, the WML information space is not large and consists primarily of quick factual information such as stock quotes, sports scores, news, and email. Many of the information providers that serve the WAP market simply transform HTML information resources to WML. However, the growth of the WML information space will mean an eventual parting of the ways, where there can be WML resources that do not have an HTML counterpart. In other words, some information sources may become available only via a WAP or wireless connection.One of the great benefits of the Web environment has been its ubiquity and its worldwide availability as a single publishing source. Old time information providers have moved to the Web at the same time that all kinds of new information providers--from the kid next door to major international corporations--have also been adding information to the public Web space. With the rise of intranets and extranets, the information space expanded and private information came to the Web, even though in ways which restricted access to authorized viewers only. Will WAP and WML lead to a separate information outlet, or will they merge with the Web in general? Given the rapid pace of change on the Web, no one knows the future. But in the meantime, as the WAP universe begins to offer its own information content, the information professional must find ways to access it. VIEWING WAP INFORMATIONThe basic problem for those without an Internet-enabled cell phone or other mobile Net access is how to view WML information. Most WML pages (or cards, as they are known to WAP users) will either have a .wml extension or a WML.MIME type. Neither Netscape nor Internet Explorer can currently display .wml pages. Try using your regular browser for PinPoint (wap.pinpoint.com), and you are likely either to have the option of downloading the file or choosing an application in which to view it. If you save the file, you can open it in any program that can view a text file. You will then see something like the following:
EMULATORSHowever, simply looking at the underlying WML will not help much to visualize it, as it is meant to be seen on the miniature cell phone screens. Instead, try an emulator. For a Web-based version, which currently models a Nokia WAP phone, try the Wapalizer (http://www.gelon.net). WML pages have URL addresses just like regular Web pages. With the Wapalizer, enter a WAP URL on the Wapalizer section of the Gelon.net page and another window will pop up that looks like a Nokia cell phone. An alternative Ericsson R380 emulator is available via Internet Explorer only. In both cases, entering the URL will display the WML card in the pop-up window.Another option is to get a separate emulator program. Phone.com offers a free UP.SDK Software Development Kit for Windows 95 and Windows NT. After filling out a free registration form, download the UP.SDK. The installation will add several programs and links, including the UP.simulator. With a regular Internet connection, invoke the UP.simulator and a virtual cell phone appears. The Phone.com UP.simulator, pictured on page 72, has a very basic screen display. When compared to the Wapalizer display, it also gives a sense of the different kinds of WAP displays available. While both emulators crashed several times, I found the UP.simulator easier to use and less prone to crash. SEEING WAP GRAPHICSAs can be seen in the emulator examples, WAP devices can display graphics, despite their small screen. While WML can incorporate graphics, they have to be in the specialized WBMP format. This one-bit version of the Bitmap (BMP) graphics format is limited to two colors. With only two colors, the WBMP images will never be of very high resolution.In addition, given the typical size of WAP browser screens, the WBMP graphics also need to be quite small. If they are too large, they will not even display at all. On top of those limitations, WAP memory restricts the total file size of any image to 1,461 bytes. For those who preferred the less graphic-intensive content of the early days of the Web, these limits may sound appealing. However, the screen can still only display a limited amount of text information before scrolling is required. WAP CONTENTThis is still the early stage in the practical use of the WML and WAP technologies. The emulators tend to crash and can work better with Internet Explorer than with Netscape. However, they do provide a way to take a peek into the world of WAP. Remember, most Web browsers cannot view these files. Use one of the emulators mentioned above to view any of the following. Stock quotes are available via agsub. stocksmart.com with separate versions for registered users and a free section. iTrackU.com offers airline tracking information. A German and English dictionary is available (http://dict.leo.org/wap/). There are games, weather reports, WAP stores, Nielsen ratings, and WAP versions of portals. All of these kinds of information sources are primarily simplified versions of Web-accessible resources. For example, the sports news and scores available from wap.totalsports.net are available in much greater detail for the Web audience (http://www.totalsports.net). REDIRECTIONS TO WAPTotal Sports demonstrates another common situation. When entering the wap.totalsports.net address into regular Web browser results, Total Sports redirects you to a different page that offers information about its WAP services. Enter wap.totalsports.net into a WAP browser and you will receive the actual WML page.This kind of redirection is common. At any given URL address, the server may check to see if the user is coming in using a Web browser or WAP browser. Then the appropriate content is displayed to the user. This has been true on the Web for some time, where many sites check to see which Web browser is being used and then supply the appropriate HTML for that browser. In general, this redirection is used to provide the appropriate layout for information, depending on the kind of browser the user has. However, there is nothing to prevent content providers from differentiating content based on the browser. For that reason, it is good to check once in a while how a site looks in Netscape, Internet Explorer, and now even on a WAP browser. BROWSING WAP SPACEThere are several places to look for WAP and WML content. Gelon.net's links page (http://www.gelon.net/links/) is a good place to browse some of the currently available resources. It is a small list, categorized in several sections such as Art, Business, Finance, News, Reference, Sport, and Travel. In browsing through these sections, it quickly becomes obvious that much of the active WML development is taking place in Europe. With a greater penetration of cell phones in Europe than in the U.S., much of the development and content may come from there first. Another option for browsing WAP information is the WAP Resources Guide (http://webcab.de/wrg/). This site is only available via the Web, not via WAP, and it primarily links to Web pages about WAP and related issues. For a larger overview of WAP and Web sites, try the WAP Reviews WAP Sites (http://springlands.com/wapreviews/), once again using a Web browser. Even though it does give WAP URLs, these are not linked and would have to be copied and pasted or transcribed directly into a WAP browser. SEARCHING WAPAs these WML resources begin to proliferate, search engines for WML pages have begun to appear as well. There are several search engines available, even though the WML space is small right now. Fast Search and Transfer offers a Fast WAP search engine, available both on the Web and in WML (http://wap.fast.no/). A Web user can search the database, but most of the links are WML pages. A WAP user can also search the database at the same URL and then display the links. WAP It Out (http://www.wapitout.com/) is also available via the Web and on a WAP device. On the Web, the interface is primarily in German. The WAP version is in English. This shows how the same URL can give very different content depending on the browser being used. A Web browser sees the German-language portal with a small directory and a search engine. The WAP browser displays an English-language list of directory headings and a search option lower down.The strangely named Orktopas (http://www.orktopas.com/) also offers a search engine accessible via the Web and WAP. The records in the Orktopas database are for WML pages. Search options and directory categories are available, and searches can be limited by country and category. All of the previous search engines are accessible via the Web, even if the content they index is not. Pinpoint has taken a different approach. The Pinpoint WAP search engine (http://wap.pinpoint.com or http://pnpt.net) is only available via a WAP device. Given the tedious nature of entering text into a cell phone, the shorter address is an advantage. The Pinpoint site has both a keyword search and a topic navigator. More recently, Google has introduced a WAP search engine which searches the whole Google database. It also converts plain HTML pages so that they can be displayed on a WAP device. The address is the same as the regular Google search engine (www.google.com), but it will automatically recognized a WAP browser. It primarily searches HTML pages rather than WML cards. WAP'S FUTURE?Several industry reports have predicted huge growth in Internet-enabled cell phones and other WAP access devices. Some predict that more people will have access to the Internet via WAP than by traditional desktop or laptop computers within three to five years. Even if that comes to pass, WAP is not the Web. While it may indeed become extremely useful for the quick transfer of brief textual information, it comes nowhere near replacing the information-rich sphere of the Web. Whatever comes in the future, the WAP information space is just one more section of the Internet to explore in this ever-changing information landscape on the Net.
WAP Sites
Communications to the author should be addressed to Greg R. Notess, Montana State University Libraries, Bozeman, MT 59717-0332; 406/994-6563; greg@notess.com ; http://www.notess.com.
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