jasonnavarro2003 wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> How useful is WML in todays mobile industry? I personally have not
> used WML for 2 years and everything that was WML has been converted
> to XHTML-MP. I know there are a lot of browsers still out there that
> support both WML and XHTML-MP, but unlike the iPhone with no WML support.
>
> My question is...Does WML have any life left in mobile development?
> And if it is dead would there be a future use for it?
>
Hi Jason, I see that many have provided their viewpoints about WML, so I
will provide mine.

To make a long story short, depending on who you are and what you do,
supporting WML may be desirable or even a requirement, yet, this is
becoming less and less so, as years go by.
I won't hide the fact that supporting WML is expensive. First, not all
WMLs are equal. Phone.com WML is more usable than Nokia WML, but this
only as long as you will exploit the idiomatic power of WML by adopting
cards, variables, keyboard accelerators and softkeys. This means
building multiple WML versions of your apps. In addition, the regular
flow of the application you are used to with XHTML may be impacted
(think Strus and other MVC frameworls here).
A large obstacle when supporting WML and XHTML, is that with XHTML you
can get away with 10kb of markup easily. WML will make you stick to 4 kb
or less. Again this is likely to impact the application flow you have
devices for your application.

If I had to provide a short answer, I would say:
if you are a large global company (Yahoo, AdMob, Google andf the like),
go the extra effort of supporting WML
anything else: ignore it and use your resources somewhere else.

Luca