3: Baby Steps

The first thing I did was to translate the static pages of this whole site into wml. Plain text with some headlines inbetween was easy. It helps to copy other peoples work and start from there to get a feel for it.

Something that's surprisingly complicated was embedding images. Those are encoded as either wbmp or jpeg files. Basically all devices support wbmp, some also do jpeg. Maartje comes in clutch again by supplying a

script

that converts modern image file formats to wbmp.

This is the point in the process where I basically stopped using m3gate: It's very particular about the wml being "correct" and will refuse to do anything until it is. So if it contains a tag it doesn't know, it will throw a fit. One of the tags it isn't aware of is the

// img //

---

-tag. Openwave is slightly better, it knows about the tag but can't display the actual image. At least it falls back to the alt text instead of throwing an error message. wApua works just fine and displays the image.

A similar screenshot of windows 2000 as before. This time without the error-message. The M3Gate emulator displays a somewhat cryptic error-text instead of the page and Openwave displays the about-section of my page without the picture of me.

The About-page of this site in wApua. The text is the same but the photograph of me is even more low-resolution than on the normal site. The cookie-emoji has been replaced with some ascii-art in the shape of a cookie.

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