Editing Wireless Markup Language (section)

==WML markup==
WML documents are XML documents that validate against the WML DTD ([[Document Type Definition]])<ref>WAP Forum: [http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml13.dtd "Wireless Markup Language (WML) 1.3 Document Type Definition"]</ref>
. The W3C Markup Validation service (http://validator.w3.org/) can be used to validate WML documents (they are validated against their declared document type).

For example, the following WML page could be saved as "example.wml":

<syntaxhighlight lang="xml">
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.1//EN"
   "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml_1.1.xml" >
<wml>
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
  </head>
  <card id="main" title="First Card">
    <p mode="wrap">This is a sample WML page.</p>
  </card>
</wml>
</syntaxhighlight>

A WML document is known as a "deck". Data in the deck is structured into one or more "cards" (pages), each of which represents a single interaction with the user.

WML decks are stored on an ordinary [[web server]] configured to serve the text/vnd.wap.wml [[MIME type]] in addition to plain HTML and variants. The WML cards when requested by a device are accessed by a bridge ([[WAP gateway]]), which sits between mobile devices and the World Wide Web, passing pages from one to the other much like a [[Proxy server|proxy]]. The gateways send the WML pages on in a form suitable for mobile device reception ([[WBXML|WAP Binary XML]]).  This process is hidden from the phone, so it may access the page in the same way as a browser accesses [[HTML]], using a URL (for example,  <nowiki>http://example.com/foo.wml</nowiki>). (Provided the mobile phone operator has not specifically locked the phone to prevent access of user-specified URLs.)

WML has a scaled-down set of procedural elements, which can be used by the author to control navigation to other cards.

Mobile devices are moving towards allowing more [[XHTML]] and even standard HTML as processing power in handsets increases. These standards are concerned with formatting and presentation.  They do not however address cell-phone or mobile device hardware interfacing in the same way as WML.