Use firefox to open wap site

Firefox is now about to take over the position of most popular browser. Due to lack of customization and security reason, now more and more user are turning using Firefox rather than other browser.

For wap developer like me, everyday involve with hundreds of trial-and-fail page load using all available browser, I found it's very useful for you all to have this plugin. WMLBrowser is essential for firefox to determine the content type text/vnd.wap.wml file.

To install, simply go to Tools -> Add Ons. On extensions tab, click "Get Extensions". Your firefox will open a new tab. Just type wml in the search box. Or you can go to WMLBrowser direct link. Once installed now you can open any WML site as it display on phone browser. All plugins above work for Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 both on Windows or Linux.

Another utility that complementary to this plugin is User Agent Switcher, to let you pretend that you really a mobile handset to wap server. This trick very useful to mask yahoo and gmail site to serve us as mobile user, as well as to download contents that should serve mobile user only.

Building a wap site

Nowadays, everything has go mobile. If you have any service, make it available on mobile phone version, you'll have your service access more than if you just make it available on web only. This all because, almost at least 80% of world population have access to mobile phone network. And mobile phone is the one we carry wherever we go.

To build a mobile phone enabled site, your have few options. There's rich HTML version (HTML v.4.0) that supported by latest device such as Nokia Internet Table, Apple Iphone and Smart phone (PDA-phone). The middle version is xHTML which is supported by newer mobile phone (with colour screen). If you going to make it available on most phone models, use WML (wireless markup language). Latest version of WML is 1.3. A basic WML page would be looks like :


<!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.3//EN" "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml13.dtd">
<wml>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="max-age=0" forua="true"/>

</head>
<card title="{$page_title|htmlspecialchars}">
<p align="center"><img src="your-logo-here" alt=""/></p>
<p>
{$main_content}


</p>

</card>
</wml>


Since WML only support basic font display, it only support bold, italic and underline, but no fancy fonts selection. This is the model that I most recommend, especially on developing country like Indonesia where new technology adoption is slow. More reading and discussion about WML can be found at WML programming mailing list. And the easiest way to test out your page is using openwave phone simulator.

If you're going to build a transactional wap site, make sure your server is supported and registered by wireless service provider (telco) so any access to the site can be detected its msisdn (mobile subscriber isdn a.k.a phone number). This information and other useful header can be found on HTTP HEADER variable HTTP_X_FH_MSISDN values. If you're using PHP, you can read that as $_SERVER[HTTP_X_FH_MSISDN] vars. Variables the supplied from telco may vary. Please read the documentation.

To provide content that match to certain phone models, you can use User Agent Profile (UAProf) to identify certain specification of the phone. But due to every device manufactures has different standard, you can use WURFL to determine most phone capabilities and specification. Now you have all the information needed to build a wap site, wap charging and provide content as the device supported.