WAP v1.2 introduces the WAP Push Architecture, enhances the
Wireless Telephony Applications (WTA) specifications, includes
support for additional bearer network technologies, and introduces
the Wireless Identity Module (WIM), which paves the way for
wireless security with a strength exceeding that commonly in use
for wired e‑commerce.
These enhancements should accelerate WAP acceptance among
consumers. Push allows a new breed of WAP application to be
developed, where alerts and trigger messages can be delivered to
consumers, thus delivering information without the consumer having
to specifically go and retrieve it. The security enhancements
should go a long way to engendering trust in consumers for
m-commerce and will be welcomed by retailers, as it makes financial
fraud very much harder to achieve. Developers will be in the happy
position of being able to develop applications where the end user
has a communications device capable of cryptographic operations,
and which can receive data in an unsolicited fashion - a
situation not often encountered elsewhere in web development.
One big pointer to WAP's (and the Web's) future is the
specification of the User Agent Profile (UAProf), which we will see
to be a crucial ingredient for W3C convergence.
WML Changes
The changes to WML that will be of interest to developers are,
thankfully, fairly minor. In general, they address inconsistencies
that have become apparent in early WAP implementations and aim to
give the user a more consistent, user-friendly interface.
accesskey attribute
This attribute assigns an access key to an element. Its purpose
is to allow the user to activate a particular element by using a
single key, enabling developers to build 'shortcuts' into their
applications.
The keys available will vary depending on the type of mobile
device being used. (Phones, for example, will usually have 0-9, *
and # keys.) For this reason, the user agent is not required
to support accesskey.
<pre> element
The <pre> element tells visual user agents that the
enclosed text is preformatted. When handling preformatted text,
user agents should make a "best effort" to:
Ø Leave white space
intact
Ø Render text with a
fixed-pitch font
Ø Disable automatic word
wrap
This feature allows the developer to override any presentational
differences between different browsers, giving users a more
consistent interface regardless of the end device used.
<table> default alignment attribute
This allows the WML author a formal means of specifying the
default alignment for a table, rather than - as at
present - leaving it to chance. Default alignment is applied
to columns that are missing alignment designators, or have
unrecognized designators. This gives the developer more direct
control over the rendering of tabulated data.
<go> enctype attribute
This attribute allows the author to specify how the user agent
should submit data on a POST operation. In WAP v1.2,
onlyapplication/x-www-form-urlencoded (the default)
ormultipart/form-data can be specified.
<input> format semantics changed
For example, <input name='X' format= "4N"> now means 0-4
numeric characters. In v1.1, this often meant precisely 4
characters, although there were differences in interpretation
between the different browsers.
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