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I've been working on a personal project lately, and even though i can't reveal much for now, i can say it'll target almost exclusively mobile devices with the ability of browsing the web – mobile phones, PDAs, portable game consoles, etc – and just the other day i bumped into an existential question. Is it still relevant to develop pages in WML?

You might think this is a stupid question and that the answer is an obvious no but once you take into consideration this 2001 press release in which Nokia announces the first XHTML Microbrowser you'll see these browsers were made available just 4 years ago – a bit less than that to be exact, end of 2001. So when you think about the average time people take before switching to a new mobile phone model and how many of them can't afford/aren't interested in high-end phones you'll see there's still thousands – probably even millions – of active mobile phones that only support WML around the globe. So it's not really a stupid question as it might appear at first sight.

Based on personal experience, i would say no, it isn't relevant to develop pages in WML anymore, because personally i'm not willing to pay that much for such a terrible browsing experience. But we all know we can't make design decisions based on our own opinions and tastes, so i had to search the web for other peoples' views.

Just in case you're wondering what WML pages are, this should give you a clue.

Is WML/WAP 1.0 completely dead?

I don't think there's a straight yes or no answer to this question. While trying to answer this, i found a couple of interesting articles regarding mobile browsing.

Minibrowser Thoughts, by Russel Beattie

Russel Beattie wrote about this, regarding the different design principles one should use when building WML pages. In the comments people were already talking about WML being dead and such. But this was last year, and twelve months are more than enough to definitely bury a technology. I had to keep on searching...

Make your site mobile friendly in 2 min. by Mike Davidson

I already knew this one, it's a pretty recent articled, written in july 2005, by Mike Davidson on how to make your website mobile-friendly in two minutes. It's effective but doesn't target WML, only XHTML. After reading the comments, i came across Brian Fling's view, in which he stated:

(...) most modern mobile devices support WAP 2.0 and if you write good XHTML-MP content you should be good on most devices.

If you are worried about supporting the maximum amount of devices, WML is still the way to go.

Later i learned that Brian Fling not only started mobiledesign.org but has also been designing mobile interfaces since 1999, so I believe he knows what he's talking about.

State of the Mobile Web by Cameron Moll

After following Brian's links, i ended up on a familiar website, reading an article i must have foolishly overlooked. Cameron Moll's first article in a series of four, Part One: State of the Mobile Web is a very useful read, with some valuable references, such as these statistics that point out:

In the UK, users downloaded 8 billion pages to their web-enabled phones during the course of 2003 (source). Here in the U.S., the numbers also seem hefty, with 21.6 million people accessing the mobile web in May 2005 (source).

Summing up the article, the mobile web is evolving and with W3C's Mobile Web Initiative we can expect more and more innovation in this area. Nice.

These articles were helpful but still, i needed an articled analysing the matter at hands, the state of WML and not the general mobile web. So after a while i found what i was looking for, or almost.

WAP is dead! by Dana Blankenhorn

Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is dead. It's a stiff, bereft of life, it rests in peace. It has expired and gone to meet its maker. WAP 1.0 is an ex-protocol!

Dana Blankenhorn wrote in 2000 an article saying that WAP Is Dead – and with an always cool Monty Python reference at the start – mainly because users say so, and also because he, being a user, thinks so as well.

Well, if WML/WAP 1.0 was dead – or at least, was dying – 5 years ago, it must be rotting by now. The reasons are pretty obvious. The text interface is pretty limitative as an information medium and also, the way it was charged – before GPRS came into play – was pretty deterrent. Also, hardware wasn't as advanced as it is today – it's a good thing we have evolution – so the protocol was suited for those devices. Nowadays, with new devices coming out with download speeds over 40kbps, there's no need for such a reduced protocol. Although, the price tag on each kilobyte might bring back the need, but let's just hope not.

Conclusions

Even though it's pretty clear that WML is a dying markup language, it's still the only option for many users around the globe. Not everyone have an XHTML Browser in their phones and it will take a while until it's accessible to the majority of users. So it isn't very polite to overlook WML altogether, now is it?

However, this isn't a medium that allows the creation of usable and dynamic web pages and plus, it isn't a language with any future whatsoever – as far as my eyes can see, at least – so there really isn't a point in limiting your website/webapp to this format, specially when you can arrange it to look pretty functional on mobile devices with XHTML browsers.

Still, for websites / web applications that focus on mobile browsing this is probably a "luxury" their designers cannot afford. If you choose not to support WML you will be leaving out a big chunk of mobile users.

Bottom line, I still feel a very faint pulse, so I plan to at least try to support WML in my current project. I say try because i still have to learn the language. Since the project will target almost exclusively mobile devices, i think it's a bit rude not to include a somewhat lighter version in WML.

Feedback

I'll leave here two questions hanging in the air for statistical reasons but feel free to share your views and discuss the subject in the comments.

questions

1. Do you regularly browse the web using a mobile device?
2. Does your device support XHTML Browsing or are you limited to viewing WML pages only?
   (see images above)