A Brief History of WAP
The Wireless Application Protocol is a global standard for bringing Internet content and services to mobile phones and other wireless devices. The WAP standards suite is maintained by an industry consortium called the WAP Forum. Founded by Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, and Openwave (then known as Unwired Planet) in June 1997, the WAP Forum now includes hundreds of member companies that are infrastructure providers, software companies, and content providers. The goal of the WAP Forum is to address the problems of wireless Internet access, ensuring that access is not limited by vendor or underlying network technology. Since its creation, the Wireless Application Protocol has passed through minor revisions (from 1.0 to 1.1, 1.2, and 1.2.1). WAP 2 is the first major revision since 1998.

The problems solved by WAP include the following:

Protocol mismatchUnlike the Internet, mobile networks (such as GSM and TDMA) are not inherently IP-based; they do not support the protocol of the Internet.

Device limitationsMobile devices (cellular phones, pagers, and palmtops) are not ideal Web clients.

UsabilityUsability is an issue, particularly with the limited size of mobile phones and pagers.

To address these issues, WAP defines a set of optimized protocols that can run over a wide variety of underlying cellular networks. It also specifies an application environment suited to small handled devices, including a display markup language (Wireless Markup Language, WML) and associated scripting language (WMLScript). Other standards cover push applications (useful for sending alerts and paging services) and telephony integration (such as initiating a voice call from a WML display page)