During the 90s, NTT, the Japanese government owned telecommunications company, established it new mobile network subsidary, DoCoMo. DoCoMo (Do Communications over Mobile Network) also means 'everywhere' in Japanese. It did not take long for DoCoMo to be everywhere.
The Japanese had taken up mobile phones quickly. A dense and large population meant each base station would service a large number of customers. Also, addresses in Japan aren't based on street names, finding addresses can be very difficult. Mobile phones offered a convinent way to get directions to your destination, without having to approach equally clueless strangers.
Advances in technology, plus a saturated mobile phone market where almost everyone has a mobile phone offered an opportunity. Creating web pages for phones was one way to get people to buy new phones and generated revenue from data transfers.
DoCoMo developed iMode (internet Mode), the markup language was initially called cHTML which is an acronym for compact Hyper Text Markup Langauge. cHTML is a subset of HTML. Mobile phones have small screens, small memory, slow transfer rates and low processing power, cHTML recognized this and cut out a number of elements.
In cHTML there are no frames, no client sided scripting (i.e. JavaScript), no tables and no style sheets. This cut down on the processing power and memory needed. In addition, having it as a subset of HTML made the learning curve for developers incredibly easy. Other mobile networks (J-Phone, Tuka, au) in Japan adapted the technology as well.
Recently, iMode changed the name of cHTML to iHTML. iHTML has a number of extra tags such as marque, blink. iMode had gained internationally recognition for excellence, it made sense to match the names up.
In the West
Meanwhile in America and Europe, new PDAs had become popular, whilst mobile phone hadn't developed as quickly as they had in Japan. A way to bring the internet to PDAs was sought. WML (Wireless Markup Langauge) part of the WAP. Like the Japanese, they saw HTML as too much of a burden for these small devices. They chose, WML a XML based language. XML documents include a section that defines how a document is structured. For more information about XML go to the w3c web site.
WML or as its commonly known WAP didn't gain market acceptance. With WAP, users were charged for the time they were connected, not for the amount of data they downloaded. WML would only use only use monochrome bit maps. WAP was expensive and didn't offer much.
Turning Japanese
WAP was looking like a flop whilst iMode with cHTML / iHTML had gained market acceptance. Consumers wanted internet access of their mobile phones and they weren't getting it. Something needed to change.
At the same time, the movement to make HTML XML compliant had also affected cHTML. Standard HTML had become XHTML. cHTML was transformed into XHTML Basic.
WAP didn't want to be left out, but it needed to maintain backward compatabilty. It was already XML compliant, so the solution was to use XHTML Basic (WAP's authors call it XHTMLMP)as the base language. Now WAP 2.0 could provide a better user experience and align itself better with current web technologies.
To quote from the WAP authors
The goal of WML2 is therefore to create a document type that extends the syntax and semantics of XHTML Basic [XHTMLBasic] and CSS Mobile Profile (convergence) with the unique semantics of WML1 (backward compatibility).
Section 4.1 Wireless Markup Language Version 2.0 11th September 2001 http://www1.wapforum.org/tech/terms.asp?doc=WAP-238-WML-20010911-a.pdf
The Future
These languages are converging. There is desire on the part of the phone makers and networks to have common standards. However, like the browser wars between Netscape and Internet Explorer during the 90's, pages can look different on different mobile phones.
The <marquee> tag (scrolls text across a page) is part of iHTML but not WAP2.0. In this case its minor issue.
Web pages for mobile phones will be different to the current internet. Portals will become important, and they have to become highly customized to be of any use to people. Keeping pages small, managing menus and content are important in deciding in people's exceptance of mobile web pages.
Mobile phones and the internet are major revolutions in the way people live. These revolutions are coming together, and web pages are just the start.
