Difference between WML and HTML

Markup languages like HTML and WML are primarily used to serve website content. The targeted systems that each language is intended to support are the fundamental distinctions between WML and HTML. HTML was developed to deliver material to personal computers, which have sufficient computational power to spare for processing and rendering the information. When the internet started to spread to mobile devices, it quickly became clear that these devices lacked the processing capability, screen size, and colour gamut necessary to support HTML. WML was created as a replacement for HTML for providing web content to mobile devices.

Wireless Markup Language (WML) has been developed to specify the structure and content for data presentation on low-bandwidth gadgets like cell telephones as well as pagers. WML, which is based on the XML markup language, is essentially a tool for making Web pages accessible via handheld wireless devices. The capabilities of WML are incredibly constrained. This is required to reduce the level of processing required to generate the site and streamline the page's flow. A WML page should not contain numerous images because they would likely be difficult to see on mobile devices' extremely small screens.

Read this article to find out more about WML and HTML and how they are different from each other.

What is HTML?

Speaking of any high-level programming tools, HTML is functional with practically all of them. The majority of browsers support HTML-based websites. Giving the user the option of zooming out and in on pages helps to somewhat address the issue of tiny screens. As a result, HTML gradually replaced WML. Computers and smartphones are improving constantly as technology advances. Increasingly more mobile phones, particularly smartphones, have screens with colour and high quality. More phones can now process HTML pages as a result of this development.

Hypertext Markup Language is the shortened form of HTML. It is employed as a structuring language for papers and webpages that will be displayed online. In order to create different kinds of websites that may be seen online, web designers utilise formatting. Similar technologies used to build web pages may also be used to create documents in HTML.

HTML is widely used to create visually appealing web pages. It is used to specify the layout, content, and overall theme of the website. You can decide which portions of the content are shown initially and which are buried as other material whenever text is presented on a webpage in HTML. Even though many businesses these days prefer high-end websites, they are much costlier than HTML-based websites.

What is WML?

WML is a markup language used for wireless devices like smartphones that is currently regarded as obsolete as opposed to HTML. WML is hardly used frequently and only serves as a secondary page. Nowadays, web pages can be viewed on smartphones and even basic feature phones, but on a considerably smaller screen than on a desktop.

The term "deck" refers to a WML document. A single user interaction is represented by each of the "cards" (pages) that make up the data in the deck. For delivering plain HTML and its variants, a standard web server is set up to provide MIME categories as well as WML decks. The bridges transmit WML pages in a format that is acceptable for mobile phone reception.

However, the most popular programming language used by developers to create web displays today is HTML. It was primarily designed for PC online browsing and website presentation.

Differences between WML and HTML

The following table highlights the major differences between WML and HTML −

Conclusion

Many contemporary browsers, such as Android browsers like Firefox and Chrome, do not support WML; however, Opera does. WML is employed on mobile devices, while computer users utilize HTML. Compared to WML, HTML calls for a lot higher processing capacity.

Both using and understanding WML are fairly simple. WML documents can be transmitted with less bandwidth now. It takes less processing power to show WML documents. Only a small amount of grayscale is supported for graphics. HTML is now more popular than WML. WML is still active and in use for both mobile and online browsers.