h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

OK, off for a sort time, with busted digit, = Bored.

Time for a project, me thinks……!!!

Hum something I’ve never wanted to do.

Parts.
One or two WAP phones.
One 2K A Server.
One BB connection to the internet,


A 56K modem.
A land lines.



First, setup a second web server and test.
Second, setup dial in accesses to it.
Get dial-in to my In-house network.

First Problem?
Normal Web content can't be displayed on the majority of cell phones. This is not only because cell phone displays are small, (somewhere between 84 pixels wide by 48 pixels tall, and/or 176-pixel by 208-pixel screen resolution) but also because the majority of them can display only grayscale or monochrome images. These issues will play havoc with your Web site contents.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, the processing power of cell phones to render Web content is low; the bandwidth available for transferring content is low (a maximum of 14.4 kilobits per second and often considerably less because of interference); connections may be lost; and the latency can be high.

In short, the wireless environment could be described as "very hostile" for Web access. small, dull, pages then, well for now.

HTML is a format that is hard for the majority of WAP browsers on cell phones to handle. Wireless Markup Language, (WML) the native tongue of my WAP browser Thus, if you want to offer information to my WAP browsers, I really need to create WML documents. Luckily, this is not very difficult.

Wireless Markup Language could be thought of as a variant of HTML (think of it as HTML Light), although technically it is a type of Extensible Markup Language (XML).

Thus WML documents should start with a Document Type Definition (DTD) declaration:

i.e. <? xml version="1.0"?> <! DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC ">

This is the current standard for all WML documents. The rest of a WML document appears inside ... tags. Within these tags is a new concept called: the deck.

A WML deck is a group of related Web pages called cards that are stored in a single WML page, which is downloaded by the WAP browser. Each card is delimited by ... tags.

And looks like this:




Hello WML World!




The id attribute is effectively a bookmark—a named reference that a link in another card in the deck can point to. (The id must be unique in the deck, and 18 characters is the maximum length due to display limitations.) The title attribute gives the WML card a name to display.

You can have as many cards in a deck as you like.


Rules for WAP/WML Displaying Content.

•Keep it simple! WAP browsers are significantly limited, so don't expect to make your WAP site look like your regular Web site.
•Always include alt text. If the user's browser doesn't display images, or the images get corrupted because of communications errors (far more common than on the wired Internet), then the alt text prevents the WML page from being useless.
• Keep your WML pages small. Remember, wireless bandwidth is scarce. the bigger, the longer they will take to download.
• Make sure your images are small and display well at low resolution.
• Test, test, test. Because WAP and WML are relatively new, you need to make sure that your new content really does work!

The only difference between a WEB server and a WAP server is what is known as MIME types. The MIME types, tell the server what to do with which type of files. WAP uses WML files, so you need to set the MIME types correctly for these types of files.

So in the Windows 2000 Internet Services Manager, select the web server or directory in which you want to place your WAP files, and select "Properties" from the right-click menu.

From the properties window, select the "HTTP Headers" tab, and then click on "File Types" at the bottom.

A list of registered file types will appear which will probably be blank at this stage.

Add the following MIME types.
.wbmp /....../ image/vnd.wap.wbmp
.wml /....../ text/vnd.wap.wml
.wmlc /....../ application/vnd.wap.wmlc
.wmls /....../ text/vnd.wap.wmlscript
.wmlsc /....../ application/vnd.wap.wmlscriptc
.wmlscript /....../ text/vnd.wap.wmlscript
.ws /....../ text/vnd.wap.wmlscript
.wsc /....../ application/vnd.wap.wmlscriptc

leave out the /....../ .


A simple test page for your server.
----------------------------------------------------
<? xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC”dot ">



Hello WML World!



-------------------------------------------------------
Save this document in the servers root directory as “Index.wml”


It's a good idea to go to the "Documents" tab, and add two new documents with names of “index.wml".

This simply sets the default document loaded if no document is specified by the browser. For some reason, Microsoft appears to like the name "default.htm", rather than "index.html" which the rest of the world seems to use!

And test, test, test, “http://www.wapsilon.com/ “ , that’s the hard bit over.

next cross it all over to the apache…!!!