There are a lot of WAP sites out there - or mobile Websites if you'd rather - and despite the surge of native mobile applications, these sites will continue to play a major rule in the migration of Web sites to mobile screens and the adoption of mobile broadband.
That's why it's so surprising that there has been so little available in the way of testing tools to help mobile Webmasters and developers test the compatibility of their WAP sites across devices.
So how are WAP sites being tested for compatibility across mobile devices? It's not pretty but browser plug-ins are doing the heavy lifting today. The awkwardness of a plug-in for WAP testing comes from the nature of the mobile ecosystem.
The combination of devices and operating systems creates a vast combination of user agent strings in the neighborhood of 11,000 (compared to only a handful for desktop browsers). Depending on which user agent string you use, the results you see on your mobile phone will vary.
Because browser plug-ins have no single repository of user agent strings for mobile site validation (only the ability to add them) you need to spend considerable time searching for mobile user agent strings online.
Some QA and dev teams also rely on real handsets which are necessary when you are testing applications or functionality on the device itself but overkill for WAP content. And real devices do not provide the source code of the downloaded mobile site nor the syntax warnings in the code - both critical for development and ongoing maintenance by Webmasters. As with the Web, it's important to know what's underneath what you're seeing to know where the problem is. If you can't see the target URL on the screen of a real device, you won't know it's broken.
Take a quick tour of MITE and see how easy it is to get started with mobile content testing from your desktop. And as of today you can also download a free copy.
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