Currently the majority of devices and applications comply more or less with the WAP 1.1 specifications. The WAP Forum has released the specifications for WAP 1.2 and it's definitely worth noting the differences, and most of all, how quickly the specifications evolve. Print the specifications out in a thousand copies and bang every journalist who says WAP is dead over the head with it! :-)

In short, the important new features in WAP 1.2 are as follows. For a description of each feature, please refer to the WAP 1.2 Specifications. You are also reminded that the The WAP Forum is the authoritative source for these specifications.

New specifications

• UAPROF (User Agent Profile) which basically allows the user agent (the browser if you will) a way to tell the content provider what its capabilities are so that the content can be formatted to get the best functionality on this particular user agent. Full specs available here.
• PUSH. PUSHing in short means that an application server can send data directly to the application environment, the user agent. For more information PUSHing, see this page.
• (..more to follow...)

WML specifications

• accesskey attribute added to <a>, <anchor> and <input> tags. The accesskey attribute will allow the user to jump to a specific anchor or input field by pressing a single key.
• <pre> tag which looks like it didn't make it into the released version of the specifications. We'll assume that it's identical to the HTML tag which encloses preformatted text.
• enctype attribute added to <go>. Used to specify how data sent from the browser should be encoded, either application/x-www-urlencoded or multipart/form-data. For GETs, only the first of these apply of course.
• align attribute added to <table> tag. Specifies the alignment of the contents within a table column with values L, R, C and D for Left, Right, Center and Default.
• The format of the <input> tag formatting attribute nf has changed from an absolute value to a range from 0 to n.
• Character encoding is no longer dependent on what is specified in the <meta> tags.

WMLScript standard libraries

• URL library now conforms with RFC2396
• Clarification on how non US-ASCII characters are represented in strings. "Non-US-ASCII characters must be converted using the character codes used in the native character set."

WEA Specifications

• Descriptions of Multipart Messages clarified (see MIME at RFC2045)
  • application/vnd.wap.multipart.mixed
  • application/vnd.wap.multipart.related
  • application/vnd.wap.multipart.alternative
  • application/vnd.wap.multipart.form-data