YesWap Mobile

Disclaimer – this is not a review. YesWap.com is a mobile site I created to showcase what I consider to be the best of the mobile web. It wouldn’t be honest to review my own site but I really want to tell you about it.

YesWap appears to be a simple wap portal, nothing but links in a hierarchical menu. The menu structure is exactly the same as that of WapReview.com. So if your browsing WapReview reading the reviews, and you see a site you’d like to view on your phone it should be easy to find on YesWap.com. If it’s under Technology | Mobile Phones in the Review it will be under Technology | Mobile Phones on YesWap.

YesWap supports both older WAP1 wml phones and the newer WAP2 xhtml basic and xhtml-mp devices. The WAP2 version of the site (first image) is spruced up with a little color but otherwise looks and works like the WAP1 site (second image). You should automatically get the right version for your device when you connect to http://yeswap.com. The links to mobile sites you see in the YesWap menu are filtered based on the capabilities of your phone. If a site in the directory has both a WAP1 and a WAP2 version you should get a link to the version your phone can handle. Obviously this is done using browser detection. As I’ve said before, no browser detection is perfect so I’ve provided a couple of urls that let you override the browser detection if your device is not being served optimal markup using the main yeswap.com site.

If you go to wml.yeswap.com, You will always see the WAP1 version of yeswap. You’ll get links to sites that support WAP1. Some of these sites themselves use browser detection to serve wml or xhtml. I don’t have any control over these linked sites but 95% of the time they do the right thing and send you wml. Another feature of the WAP1 version of Yeswap is that it has a built in (x)html to wml transcoder. If you navigate to a WAP2 only site like the International Herald Tribune, Variety or Slashdot, it will automatically be converted to wml. The transcoder also kicks in if you are on the main yeswap.com site and you phone is detected as being wml only. You will lose images and colored text and backgrounds with the transcoder but web forms and cookies are supported.

If you don’t ever want to see WAP1 content, use htm.yeswap.com. The site itself will be rendered in hand-held friendly html which is perfect for PDA’s and Sidekicks and also works on virtually all WAP2 devices (second image). In this mode all wml-only sites will be filtered out of the menus. I haven’t gotten around to writing a wml to html transcoder and as wml-only sites are getting less and less common I probably never will.

I hope you enjoy Yeswap.com. If it doesn’t work for you send me a comment and I’ll try to fix it. I probably won’t be able to help you if one of the linked sites won’t load on your phone. Some sites aren’t 100% standards compliant and certain phones are very picky or even outright buggy.

html wml