WAP Standards
The Wireless Application Protocol is defined by more than thirty documents that are available for download (as Adobe PDF files) from the official site of the WAP Forum. The standards are currently at revision 1.3, and a new version is issued approximately every six months. To get a good overview of WAP, check out the Wireless Application Protocol Architecture Specification and the Wireless Application Environment Overview. WAP developers will want to look at the Wireless Markup Language Specification and the WMLScript Language Specification, which together form the basis for building WAP applications. Defining functions that are available to WMLScript programs, the WMLScript Standard Libraries Specification is also of interest to developers.
In later articles, we will explore WAP application development using WML and WMLScript. When considering the WAP documentation, it is important to understand that many of the standards are not yet fully implemented in existing WAP gateways and clients. For example, early WAP devices do not support the latest version of WML, and support for security and telephony functions varies greatly between providers of gateways and client devices.