WAP Site vs. Traditional HTML for a Mobile Website

Question

If you had some social networking applications and you wanted your users to interact with them using a mobile device would you use WAP or a slimmed down version of your regular website with HTML?

My train of thought is that WAP is dead or at least starting to bleed to death because of all the mobile web browsers available ( Iphone, Opera Mini ). Is this a good assumption?

Also, what kind of audience considerations should you take into account when choosing what kind of mobile access you wanted to develop?

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Answer to Paul:

Not sure about my target devices. I'm pretty sure my users will be more "modern" so we can assume Windows Mobile, iPhone, and Blackberry devices.

Answer 1

You shoud use standard XHTML 1.0 Strict or XHTML Mobile Profile. WAP is going to die very, very soon (if it hasn´t already).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML_Mobile_Profile

Answer 2

Slimmed down HTML.

WAP sites are universally ugly, in my view, and with mobile browsers becoming more capable, Ajax applications are increasingly possible (and can work well with the limited bandwidth/data plans that people may have.

But if you need to support every mobile device on the planet, you may have to do something with WAP anyway.

What are your target devices? Everything, modern-ish phones, smartphones only....?

Answer 3

Having developed a few mobile applications I would say that the majority of clients support HTML. It is of course safe to serve these clients a slimmed down version of HTML in order to design your application for the common denominator. However, there is still a significant number of clients which only accept WML as their content type and thus HTML cannot satisfy all your users.

If you read the HTTP_ACCEPT header you can determine what the client is able to understand. In my experience it is safer to serve HTML whenever you can and fall back on WML when you have to.

The bottom line is that if you are reluctant to supporting two versions of your site, use slimmed down HTML (preferably XHTML). If you can support WAP in addition to HTML it makes a nice fallback for the clients which do not understand HTML.

Answer 4

WAP 2.0 = XHTML Mobile Profile. I'm assuming by WAP you mean WAP 1.0 and WML. Pretty much all mobile browsers these days support XHTML MP (or some close cousin).

For best practices on mobile development, refer to the dotMobi Mobile Web Developer's Guide.

I suggest you use something like WURFL to auto-detect mobile browsers, and serve them XHTML MP with Wireless CSS. I've built a mobile front-end for an application in this way, and it works well across lots of mobile browsers (mobile ie, opera, openwave, ...).

Answer 5

Do remember that WAP has strengths of it's own that normal HTTP sites browsed from mobile handsets do not posess.

A major one is that you can get access to WAP billing, where you can charge small amounts of money from customers that may not have credit cards available.

Also you can use the MSISDN (mobile phone number) to uniquely identify and track visitors to you WAP site.