QuickStudy: Wireless Markup Language

By Jaikumar Vijayan

January 24, 2000 12:00 PM ET

WirelessMarkup Language (WML)was designed to describe content and format for presenting data on limited-bandwidth devices such as cellular phones and pagers. In essence, WML, which is based on the content-tagging language XML, provides a tool to make Web pages accessible from handheld, wireless devices.

What it Does

Rather than attempting to deliver the same Web page content you would see on a PC's Web browser, WML strips away much of the extra information found on pages coded with the Internet programming language HTML — especially graphics and animation. It presents mainly text-based information in a manner that's optimized and easily accessible for users of mobile devices, according to Roger Snyder, a senior product manager at Phone.com Inc. in Redwood City, Calif., one of the technology's leading proponents.

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WML can be used in wireless devices to update electronic schedules, check inventory information from corporate intranets or present time-sensitive, discrete pieces of data such as stock quotes, weather reports, e-mail or calendar and appointment data.

Apart from helping developers present Web data in a better fashion, WML lets them optimize it for the slower connections of wireless devices. For instance, WML lets cellular phone users map frequently used Internet functions like looking up stock information to specific keys in the same manner that users can store frequently used telephone numbers.

Similarly, WML is telecommunications-aware and lets users do things such as switch between making calls and getting Internet information relatively easily, Snyder says.

Fueling a lot of the interest in technologies like these is the projected growth of wireless phone use, says Ken Hyers, an analyst at Cahners In-Stat Group in Newton, Mass.

"You are going to have 1 billion wireless phone users in 2002, while wireless penetration in the U.S will exceed 50% of the population . . . it's a huge market," Hyers says.

The opportunity for vendors lies in making the Internet easier to access and interact with for such users, Hyers says.

Limited Bandwidth

"Given that we don't have much by way of [wireless] bandwidth today, we need some sort of a protocol that is very lightweight and suitable for moving information" from the Web to wireless devices, says Craig Mathias, an analyst at The Farpoint Group, a consultancy in Ashland, Mass.

WML's roots lie in efforts by Ericsson Inc. in Research Triangle Park, N.C.; Nokia Corp. in Irving, Texas; Motorola Inc. in Schaumburg, Ill.; and Phone.com to define a standard, widely accepted protocol for wireless communication with the Web.

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