WML, WAP, & Microformats Demo! by ArtLung

In 1998 WML, the Wireless Markup Language 1 was born. It is obsolete now. And the phone you are carrying and the browser you are reading probably cannot render it properly. It was designed for a time when bandwidth was very limited, and phones were not powerful.

How it worked was a developer, such as myself, would write XML documents that would be served through a 3rd party WAP Gateway. That gateway would convert the WML to a binary format that the phone could understand.

By about 2001, this was already obsolete. XHTML and WAP 2 were becoming popular, and phones were getting powerful enough to render documents without a WAP Gateway. I am Joe Crawford, and I have been making things on the web since before WML existed. I've probably marked up every sort of markup one can mark up. And these little bits of trivia represent offshoots of the web that fascinate me.

One fascination? "WBMP." Wireless Bitmap images are 1-bit. They have no color. Just a classic on and off bit which we consider black or white, but more likely would render as a shade of green or amber on a monochrome phone.

The image above is a GIF. I tried to use a WBMO. It didn't work. The Mime Type image/vnd.wap.wbmp version won't load in browsers. Adobe may kind of suck, but Photoshop can still read and write one of these files here in 2025. Try the WBMP.

And the WML page itself is being sent with a mime type of text/html rather than application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml or text/vnd.wap.wml since I couldn't get those to load properly. One downloads the page. One shows the source. Browsers forgot how to render that kind of markup.

Wikipedia points at tools which can parse and render a WML document, but I don't believe there are any I can run on my computer. In that way, my computer is worse than some antique phone.

There is a project: Blamba.de, which hosts a WAP Gateway and other goodies if you have an ancient phone that speaks WAP. There's a terrific presentation explaining Blåmba! Behind the scenes of a 2000s-style ringtone provider. It is fascinating!

My fun fact? The class attribute is supported in WML. And that means that Microformats can be used in WML documents. This page demonstrates that. Microformats turn 20 years old here in 2025. It's an effort to make pages a bit more meaningful.

I wrote above that this page uses WML 1.1.
https://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml_1.1.xml will not load properly because the DTD is served as XML from wapforum.org. Document type defintitions reach back to SGML, the Standard Generalized Markup Language, which was developed in the 1980s.

Read the DTD loaded from this site, with a text/plain MIME type. That DTD is copyright Wireless Application Protocol Forum Ltd., 1998,1999. It defines the elements and attributes that can be legal in a WML document, which also must be a valid XML document.

WML is sort of like HTML. But not. And sort of like XHTML. But not. Here are tags as mentioned by the <!ELEMENT> blocks from the DTD: wml, card, do, onevent, head, template, access, meta, go, prev, refresh, noop, postfield, setvar, select, optgroup, option, input, fieldset, timer, img, anchor, a, table, tr, td, em, strong, b, i, u, big, small, p, br

Validate the WML 1.1 page (kudos to the W3C for retaining this validator!) ~ There is also a Faux retro-styled version of the page, which consumes the WML XML and converts it, on the server, into valid HTML5. For fun.

Because WML elements may have the class attribute, this page supports microformats: as parsed with pin13.net, as parsed with indiewebify.me

Made by Joe Crawford for the ArtLung Lab in 2025-06-18T18:28:07+00:00.
Syndicated to: IndieNews