[thelist] Wireless Development and eCommerce Tools

Teresa,

I don't have any development experience in this arena, just research.
This particular paragraph from a webmonkey article
(http://www.hotwired.com/webmonkey/99/48/index3a.html)
might offer some insight:
"WML (wireless markup language, not to be confused with 
Website Meta Language), a fully XML-compliant descendant
of HDML, is part of the WAP standard. Because WML was
developed after HDML, it's a bit more graceful (it is wholly based
on XML) and is likely to have lots of great features in its next
version. While WML is gaining acceptance (third- and fourth-generation 
UP.Browsers, which are shipping with today's phones, understand both
HDML and WML), at present, HDML is still much more widely
accepted and will continue to be the standard for some time, especially
in North America."

While I can't make any authoritative recommendations about the two
as development languages, but I can offer my conclusions about which
is the best to support.  I think it really depends on who you are
trying to cater to; in most cases, these people are early adopters-
individuals on the high-end of the tech curve.  I think if you are
going to support one of these, support the newcomer.  With Nokia
backing it and being fully XML-compliant, I think you'll see it become
the standard.  To me, the biggest factor in the making the decision
would be implementation time and cost.  If you believe, as I do, that
WML will soon become the standard, why would you want to write
an HDML presentation layer, and then retrofit it with WML?  To 
prevent from alienating a few of those early adopters?  If they really
want to visit your site, they'll go to a desktop.

That being said, if wireless users are an important part of your
target audience now (say you are offering stock quotes, phone
directories, instant messaging or other such data), then support
them both, by all means.  As much as we hate it, a big part of
our work is making sure that veritably all of our audience can
comfortably use our sites.

My $.02,
Christopher Atkins