Concept in Definition ABC

When mobile phones weren't yet smartphones, they could already access Internet and view web pages, as long as they have compatibility with the system

WAP, Wireless Application Protocol, which defines the protocols and technical standards necessary to connect mobile devices to the Internet, and more specifically mobile phones, mainly, access to the Web.

By not having a software as powerful as the current smartphones, the web browsers of the first mobile phones were not capable of handling the HTML, and there were no pages responsive, unlike the ones we have today, that is why the language

WML (Wireless Markup Language), thought as a substitute for HTML for mobile devices of the time, based on XML, and that allows defining elements much simpler than those defined in HTML.

At some point, the browsers of those most primitive cell phones began to be able to present HTML, but still in a very rudimentary way, and completely disjoining the composition of the page.

This, together with the high costs of connecting to the Internet from the mobile phone that existed at the time (in the early-mid-nineties), made it difficult to popularize this way of accessing the Web, to the point that today it is non-existent or, at least, Irrelevant.

The WAP not only defines access to the Web, but also to other Internet services, such as e-mail.

Over time, the WAP progressed and incorporated technological innovations, such as the technologypush, which allows you to turn your phone into receiver passive information, that is, it is the server that actively sends information to the terminal that is presented to the Username.

The great leap forward from WAP was its version 2.0, released in 2002, which was re-made from the ground up using XHTML and with an HTTP encoding, with which there is an approach to the protocols of the rest of the Internet services and the Web.

This new version 2.0 of the protocol WAP also adopted CSS style sheets to model the appearance of the web pages.

As a curiosity, the technology of MMS messages, which are a multimedia extension to SMS, derives directly from WAP.

Photos: Fotolia - Dmitry - Tashatuvango