In networking for
mobile devices
A mobile device (or handheld computer) is a computer small enough to hold and operate in the hand. Mobile devices typically have a flat LCD or OLED screen, a touchscreen interface, and digital or physical buttons. They may also have a physical ...
, WMLC is a format for the efficient transmission of
WML web pages over
Wireless Application Protocol
Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is a technical standard for accessing information over a mobile wireless network. A WAP browser is a web browser for mobile devices such as mobile phones that use the protocol. Introduced in 1999, WAP achieve ...
(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) is a packet oriented mobile data standard on the 2G and 3G cellular communication network's global system for mobile communications (GSM). GPRS was established by European Telecommunications Standards Insti ...
/
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
{{Reflist
Internet protocols