Phone.com later joined Ericsson, Nokia, and Motorola and founded the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) Forum. WAP is an open, global specification the purpose of which is to allow mobile users with wireless devices easy access to the wealth of
information on the Internet. As part of the standard, WML (wireless markup language), a fully XML-compliant descendant of HDML, was developed to code pages for viewing via a micro-browser that resides on a mobile phone, pager or PDA. WML is gaining
acceptance as newer generations of UP. Browsers continue to ship with todays phones and support both WML and
HDML.
Google's offers great support for those with WAP browsers. If you are using a WAP device when searching, Google will not only translate the original page that you select from its search results from HTML into a WAP format, but if you select a link from
that page, Google continues to translate as you make your way through the web. In addition, Google has recently completed a crawl of WML pages, and it may integrate these into its main index and ensure that they rank more highly in response to searches from
those using wireless browsers.
A
relatively new product is Instant Wap, which is totally transparent to the visitor. If they view the site
with conventional browsers, they see your site. If they log in from their PDA, they see the wireless version of your site.
There's no need for a special "wireless URL," no need for instructions or help pages.
Another
development tool is PenDragon
Forms which allows you to build high powered, full
featured data
collection systems for Palm OS devices in minutes. PUMATECH-Satellite
Forms allows you to create PALM OS applications with
"drag-and-drop" ease. PenRight
ModileBuilder is a Mobile Application Development tool
specifically designed to quickly create,powerful, world class,
cross-platform, custom enterprise applications forPalm OS.
Some basic rules when designing for
the PPC platform:
1) The screen size is roughly 230x250 (having no
scroll bars)
2) Some devices can only display 12-bit color while
others can display16-bit color, so you'll have to
watch gradient banding.
3) There are HTML limitations that are covered in a white
paper from Microsoft, which provides a free
development tool.
