In networking for
mobile devices
A mobile device or handheld device is a computer small enough to hold and operate in hand. Mobile devices are typically battery-powered and possess a flat-panel display and one or more built-in input devices, such as a touchscreen or keypad. Mod ...
, WMLC is a format for the efficient transmission of
WML web pages over
Wireless Application Protocol
Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is an obsolete technical standard for accessing information over a mobile cellular network. Introduced in 1999, WAP allowed users with compatible mobile devices to browse content such as news, weather and sp ...
(WAP). Its primary purpose is to compress (or rather tokenise) a WML page for transport over low-bandwidth internet connections such as
GPRS
General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), also called 2.5G, is a mobile data standard on the 2G cellular communication network's Global System for Mobile Communications, global system for mobile communications (GSM). Networks and mobile devices wit ...
/
2G.
WMLC is apparently synonymous with Wireless Application Protocol Binary XML (
WBXML
WAP Binary XML (WBXML) is a binary representation of XML. It was developed by the WAP Forum and since 2002 is maintained by the Open Mobile Alliance as a standard to allow XML documents to be transmitted in a compact manner over mobile networks and ...
).
Description
WMLC is most efficient for pages that contain frequently repeated strings of characters. Commonly used phrases such as "www." and "
http://www." are tokenised and replaced with a single byte just before transmission and then re-inserted at the destination.
WMLC has an added advantage that the data can be progressively decoded unlike some compression algorithms that require all of the data to be available before decompression begins. As soon as the first few bytes of WMLC data are available, the WAP browser can start creating the page, this means the user can see the page being constructed as it is downloaded.
Content type is application/vnd.wap.wmlc.
References
Internet protocols
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