** Continued From: Pockets of Porn! - Part #1

In my last article, I explained to you about Wireless Access Protocol or WAP. I also pointed out the large and growing market of people that access sites through their wireless devices.

"In WAP lingo, each individual page is called a card and a set of pages are known as a deck."

In this second installment of this series on porn for the PDA and cell phone, I will show you the basics of building your very own WAP site.

Before you begin building WAP pages, you will want a way to test your creations before you unleash them to the world. A good way to do this is to get a cell phone emulator. I found a good, free emulator (WAP browser) called M3Gate. You can download it from one of the more reliable software sites such as CNET, or ZDNET. Now that you have a way to view your pages, let's learn a little code.

WAP pages are written in a code called WML. This XML-based language looks a lot like HTML. One very important detail you must remember when writing WML code is that all the tags and definitions must be in lower-case. One other thing I will now do is refer to WAP pages as "cards". In WAP lingo, each individual page is called a card and a set of pages are known as a deck. A card must also have a bit of code that defines it to the browser.

Here is the code that will go at the top of each card:

<?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.1//EN" "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml_1.1.xml">

As you can see from the above code, WML uses open and close brackets on tags. Each card should also include it's title and an ID for linking and bookmarking purposes. The basic skeleton of a deck will look like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?><!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.1//EN" "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml_1.1.xml">
<wml>
<card id="card1" name="Cozy Frog"></card>
</wml>

All text entered between the card tags will appear as plain text. The paragraph tag is used, but it must always have a closing bracket and nesting paragraphs is not allowed. You can enhance the text with the same tags as HTML such as bold, italic and underline. However, a line break tag has the XML-style forward slash at the end. You can also specify the text alignment and wrapping.

Because your new wireless site will undoubtedly have more than one card in the deck, you'll want to learn how to link to the next card from the first card. To link from one card to another in the deck, you will use the next card's ID and also insert a # in front of it within an anchor tag.

A relative link will work to send the user to another deck on your same server or on another site. Below is an example of the code for a card with greeting text and links:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml_1.1.xml">

<wml>

<card id="card1" name="Cozy Frog">
<p><a href="#card2"> Come inside </a></p>
</card>

<card id="card2" name="Welcome">
<p> Welcome to Cozy Frog! </p>
<p><a href="http://www.goaway.com"> Go away </a></p>
</card>

</wml>

Putting an image in your card is pretty much the same as putting one on your HTML page. The main difference being that images for WAP are not in GIF or JPG format, but rather in the format: WBMP. WBMP is small-sized and looks very much like the average LCD image. The code for a image on a card is just like the image source tag except that the alt portion must include text. The tag also must finish with a forward slash because there is no closing tag.

There are several other end-user features you can add to your new wireless site, such as drop-down menus and typed input. WAP doesn't yet allow streaming video (or some of the other qualities you might offer on your regular website), but WAP will let you get your message out to your wireless customers.

Unlike a house of cards, a deck is easy to create and not nearly as fragile.

In the conclusion to this series, I will show you places where you can host your WAP sites and the programs you can download to ease the construction of them. For right now, I will give you the address to a cool, online tool that will let you view your built cards in real time.

The tool is called the "Wapalizer". The Wapalizer lets you type in the address of any WML file stored in a web directory. When you click on the "Wapalize" button, you get to see just how your WML card or your regular website appears to a viewer using a wireless device. The Wapalizer is located at Gelon.net.

** Click Here For: Pockets of Porn! - Part #3