Two approaches to bringing Internet services to WAP devices

The next big challenge of the Internet is mobile access. More and more info rmation is available on the Internet and intranets and mobile users will al so need access to it. Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) based devices mak e it possible to access Wireless Markup Language (WML) based services with mobile browsers. The first WAP compliant devices have already been released on the market and more are to come. In the future there will be a need for Web services that are specially targeted for mobile users. We have studied this mobile-aware approach to service design by implementing a WML applica tion and evaluating it on three different WAP platforms. Based on our evalu ation results, we recognize challenges for future WAP devices and mobile-aw are services. We have also studied if it would be possible to access the al ready existing Internet information with WAP devices. We have developed an HTML/WML conversion proxy server, which converts HTML-based Web contents au tomatically and on-line to WML. This approach gives the mobile users transp arent access to their familiar Web pages from their mobile phones and other mobile devices. Our study indicates that if HTML-based Web services follow certain guidelines, they can be converted automatically to WML and adapted to the client device. In principle these guidelines already exist as World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Content Accessibility Guidelines and W3C Note fo r HTML 4.0 Guidelines for Mobile Access. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Sci ence B.V. All rights reserved.