WML Based Mobile Business System

Since 1990s, there are two impressive trends appeared in information and communication technology (ICT): the explosive spread of mobile phone and internet, which have already affected, and are affecting almost everyone's life. These two ICT mainstreams are pushed by technology to be an integrated application called mobile internet or wireless internet. Via the mobile internet, we can be online anywhere and everywhen. This pervasive computing will change the traditional business model thoroughly and make more new opportunities and transaction models.Although there are many mobile business solution built on the wireless internet infrastructure, but it is a big problem to wireless Internet developer how are the web page presented on the mobile device. Because the mobile terminal device, such as mobile phone, and PDA, have different screen size, resolution and color depth. This paper will introduce a solution to build a mobile business platform using modern wireless communication, internet technology and modern E-business mode. It supports desktop PC, also many kinds of mobile devices, such as cell phone, pocket pc and other PDA devices. All contents can be presented correctly on various devices regardless the size, resolution and color depth of the screen and browser the mobile device used.An alternate solution is to use an embedded mini-browser that can display the wireless content adaptively, but this solution depends on high requirement of thesystem resources.A better solution is to separate the content and presentation. Wireless contentshould be coded in WML format; this is a XML-based markup language forwireless application, parsed by web server and presented correctly according thedisplay attributes automatically by a WAP browser.However, although the mobile device has more powerful computing capability,more power and memory, but resource limitation and display compatibility isstill a problem. It is almost impossible for us to write the same presentation codefor all kinds of mobile display equipment. We need a new presentationmechanism. OMA released new generation mobile services, WAP2.0, which isbased on W3C related XHTML specifications and improved the WAPl.x. Ituses XML-based XHTML MP and CSS to separate the content and presentation.When web content server gets a request from mobile terminal, it can get the typeof terminal device from request context, then the server render the appreciateresponse for the device.We also give a reference implement system based on XHTML specificationrecommended by OMA and W3C, using MS .NET mobile platform as adevelopment environment, and using Openwave and Pocket PC emulator as atest environment.This paper reviews the history of WAP, and demonstrates a reference solutionon .NET platform. We built an author information search page to show thefeatures XHTML in internet and wireless environment in full, and with moreportability and scalability.