WML & colour images

[Dave Weaver]

[ After some Googling I still wasn't sure of the most appropriate
newsgroup for this question - if it is not here, then please accept my
apologies; let me know where it is and I will post there instead ].


We have an old WML1-based WAP site, and I have been asked to investigate
updating it to use colour images for modern WAP devices. As I understand
it (correct me if I'm wrong) colour image display uses .png images (as
opposed to the monochrome .wbmp imags) and requires WML2.

How can I make our site compatible with both newer colour devices and
older monochrome devices? Can I create one .wml file that works with
both "generations"? If so, how is it determined when to display colour
or mono images? (I hope that question made sense...)

Where can I find some suitable resources covering this sort of thing
(lots of Googling didn't turn up much of use)?

Many thanks,
Dave.

 

[Andy Dingley]

How can I make our site compatible with both newer colour devices and
older monochrome devices?

I know little about this. I have some ancient (1999-2000) hands-on
with WAP / WML , and some current stuff this year. The old stuff was
beyond ugly and well into blecherous. However I don't know how widely
applicable my techniques are - we were feeding content to a portal
that was very closely bound to one network and we simply didn't care
about widespread access.

The solution from our viewpoint was to use tools from Bango and
Vodafone's PartnerML. This is an abstract layer that you author to,
and a network stack that recognises the device's behaviour and applies
appropriate transcoding to it. From the author's viewpoint it was
quite easy to work with (although the dev tools were poor to
non-existent).