Wireless Application Protocol

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Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is a now obsolete technical standard for accessing information over a mobile cellular network. Introduced in 1999,^[1] WAP allowed at launch users with compatible mobile devices to browse content such as news, weather and sports scores provided by mobile network operators, specially designed for the limited capabilities of a mobile device.^[2] The Japanese i-mode system offered another major competing wireless data standard.

Before the introduction of WAP, mobile service providers had limited opportunities to offer interactive data services, but needed interactivity to support Internet and Web applications. Although hyped at launch, WAP suffered from criticism. However the introduction of GPRS networks, offering a faster speed, led to an improvement in the WAP experience.^[3][4] WAP content was accessed using a WAP browser, which is like a standard web browser but designed for reading pages specific for WAP, instead of HTML. By the 2010s it had been largely superseded by more modern standards such as XHTML.^[5] Modern phones have proper Web browsers, so they do not need WAP markup for compatibility, and therefore, most are no longer able to render and display pages written in WML, WAP's markup language.^[6]