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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING THE MOBILE WEB

i - mode in Japan

In February 1999, the Japanese network carrier NTT DoCoMo launched a service called “ i - mode ”

as a feature that allowed mobile subscribers access to simple Web content on their mobile handsets.

Rather than requiring a new markup language like HDML or WML, i - mode browsers were capable of

rendering pages written in C - HTML, which was simply a subset of the HTML v3.2 language common

at the time. Although publishers were encouraged to build special C - HTML sites speciﬁ cally for

i - mode usage, they used their existing HTML knowledge and tools, which meant there was a much

smaller barrier to getting sites online. That factor resulted in a huge number of publishers doing so.

Many things contributed to i - mode (and similar rival offerings from other carriers) becoming

hugely popular in Japan. One was the reliability and consistency of the browsers and the networks;

another was the way in which DoCoMo provided billing mechanisms that allowed site owners to

take payments from users for various commercial services. Some also suggest that the relative lack

of PC - based Web access in Japan at the time also drove i - mode to success; for many consumers,

their mobile device was the easiest and quickest way to access Web content at all, so i - mode

adoption grew phenomenally (rising to 40 million users in a mere four years following its launch).

Whatever the reasons, i - mode and other Japanese mobile web platforms were held in high esteem

by the mobile industry elsewhere in the world. Very quickly, their ubiquitous use throughout Japan

became a blueprint for what a successful mobile web might look like, and several European and

Asian carriers endeavored to replicate its success by using exactly the same technologies in their own

networks several years later. (Notably, most of these were unsuccessful, suggesting that the i - mode

technology itself was not the main factor of the Japanese network ’ s success.)

Wireless Access Protocol

The WAP Forum, formed in 1997, was a standards body dedicated to helping bring web - like access

to simple handsets across low - bandwidth mobile networks (such as GSM and GPRS). The WAP

standards that were produced, ﬁ rst as a reference v1.0 in 1998, and then as a deployable v1.1 in

1999, deﬁ ned a whole stack of protocols to help deliver content efﬁ ciently across these networks.

Central to the WAP architecture was the role of the WAP gateway, which, like the UP.Link gateway,

was responsible for taking content available on web servers hosted on the Internet and essentially

compiling it into an efﬁ cient bytecode format that the browsers on the handset could efﬁ ciently handle

and render. Because of this compilation process, content could not be written in arbitrary HTML; it

had to be created in strict, well - formed WML — Wireless Markup Language, as shown here:

<?xml version=”1.0”?>

<!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC “-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.1//EN”

“http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml_1.1.xml” >

<wml>

Welcome to my first WAP deck.

</card>

This is the next card of the WAP deck.

</card>

</wml>

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