Wireless Application Protocol

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Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is a technical standard for accessing information over a mobile wireless network. A WAP browser is a web browser for mobile devices such as mobile phones that use the protocol. Introduced in 1999,^[1] WAP achieved some popularity in the early 2000s, but by the 2010s it had been largely superseded by more modern standards such as XHTML.^[2] Modern phones have proper Web browsers, so they do not need WAP markup for compatibility, and therefore, most are no longer able to render and display pages written in WML, WAP's markup language.^[3]

Before the introduction of WAP, mobile service providers had limited opportunities to offer interactive data services, but needed interactivity to support Internet and Web applications such as email, stock prices, news and sports headlines. The Japanese i-mode system offered another major competing wireless data protocol.