WAP Site vs. Traditional HTML for a Mobile Website
If you had some social networking applications and you wanted your users to interact with them using a mobile device would you use WAP or a slimmed down version of your regular website with HTML?
My train of thought is that WAP is dead or at least starting to bleed to death because of all the mobile web browsers available (Iphone, Opera Mini). Is this a good assumption?
Also, what kind of audience considerations should you take into account when choosing what kind of mobile access you wanted to develop?
I'm ot sure about my target devices. I'm pretty sure my users will be more "modern" so we can assume Windows Mobile, iPhone, and Blackberry devices.
Answer
WAP 2.0 = XHTML Mobile Profile. I'm assuming by WAP you mean WAP 1.0 and WML. Pretty much all mobile browsers these days support XHTML MP (or some close cousin).
For best practices on mobile development, refer to the dotMobi Mobile Web Developer's Guide.
I suggest you use something like WURFL to auto-detect mobile browsers, and serve them XHTML MP with Wireless CSS. I've built a mobile front-end for an application in this way, and it works well across lots of mobile browsers (mobile ie, opera, openwave, ...).