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3.7 Where and how do I register a WAP domain?

There is no difference between a "web" domain and a WAP domain. If you already have a web site, then you also have an Internet Provider who have hooked your site to the internet.

The common host names for "web" sites is www or www.mydomain.com, and the typical host name for a WAP site is wap.mydomain.com.

When a domain is registered either via your Internet Provider or directly to one of the domain registration companies like Network Solutions, you register the domain part, i.e. mydomain.com. A so called Domain Name Server (DNS) is then assigned to hold a list of names and addresses for the hosts that live in this domain. The DNS simply translates textual human readable host names into IP addresses, and IP addresses into human readable host names. If you have a "web" site, you will have at least one host in this list called www which points to an IP address. When someone attempts to access you site, the DNS for the domain is asked "What is the IP address of the host called www.mydomain.com?" and the DNS replies with the IP address, for instance "193.143.2.90", which the requester then uses to access the site.

To add a WAP host to your domain, you basically just need to add a host in the DNS for the domain can call this host wap. Any user requesting the IP address of wap.mydomain.com will now receive the IP address of this WAP host.

The WAP host and the "web" host can have the same IP address, which in effect means that you serve both "web" and WAP content from the same web server. Since "web" browsers read HTML and WAP browsers read WML, your web server needs to be able to tell which type of browser it is talking to, and that can be done with a simple script on the server. This is explained here. Since both the www.mydomain.com and the wap.mydomain.com host names both point to the same IP address, the WAP users can access www.mydomain.com and the "web" users can wap.mydomain.com. After all, the textual host name is just a human readable representation of the IP address of the host.

If you have one server for "web" content, and another for WAP content, you obviously need to point the "web" hostname (www.mydomain.com) to the IP address of the web server hosting the "web" contents, and the WAP hostname (wap.mydomain.com) to the web server hosting the WAP contents.

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