Accessing wap, wml or xhtml pages for mobile phones with your PC browser (Mozilla/Firefox)
Posted by superuser
The era of Web 2.0 technology is so mature that many web developers worldwide are designing web applications for mobile phones. No doubt, this is the future and this in agreement with the rapid evolution of smartphones (see the family Symbian, Windows Mobile, iPhone, BlackBerry/RIM, Android and OpenMoko), and as the companies follow a low-cost marketing plan seems that the future is not too distant.
Wap, wml and generally xml are the standards page formats for a tipical wap site. Profiles for any type of mobile phone are properly declared on the rendering engine of the response engine/server in order to provide a correct and pleasant display content in regard of this specific mobile device. This is maybe the biggest difference with the servicing of content for a pc web browser and a mobile phone browser.
In most countries around the world the mobile internet connection is not so cheap. So for the developer testing the application is a necessity that usually is done via simulation with various tools as Proximitron. Roughly the idea is to make a trick and hide from the servicing engine that we're using a pc browser. This info is provided from our browser to the server from our first request from a parameter named "User Agent". If we can change our PC browser's User Agent to a predefined-true mobile User Agent, the servicing engine will deliver the content for this specific profile. In this way we could check for different User Agents and so for different mobile phones how the content will be dislayed on the screen.
I didn't mention that browsers does not read wap (wml, xml) pages. In fact, Proximitron although a precious simulation tool it's not so easy to be configured. And now the good news. Mozilla offers all the things we need in four plugins. All we have to do is install, create a profile ( or more if you make serious business) and that's all. Wap pages leave out big images and publicity, so you could use wap pages to read briefly news, maybe more fast than RSS offers.
Install the following add-ons of Mozilla/Firefox :- wmlbrowser
Version 0.7.20 - User Agent Switcher
Version 0.6.11 - Modify Headers
Version 0.6.4 - XHTML Mobile Profile
Version 0.5.3
Loading a mobile profile:
From Mozilla/Firefox menu select: TOOLS => User Agent Switcher => Options => options
Select "Add" to add a new profile.
For ex. Nokia 6630 use the following fields:
Description: Nokia6630
User Agent: Nokia6630/1.0 (2.39.129) Series60/2.6 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1
Leave all others fields empty.
Click OK to save the new profile and exit. In any case, note that you can simply use the default profiles provided with the add-on installation.
Selecting a new profile device:
From the Mozilla/Firefox menu select: TOOLS => User Agent Switcher => and from the appending list select your mobile profile device (for ex.Nokia 6630). That' all! In the following you can see a demonstration made with my browser. Happy New Year!
