Oslo, Norway — (press release excerpt) — Opera Software today announced that future versions of its browser will support the new and improved Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) 2.0 standard in future releases. With the integration of WAP 2.0, Opera can offer mobile Internet Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM's) an all-in-one solution for their devices, as well as providing desktop users with unique… continued access for their favorite WAP sites.

Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is an open specification that gives mobile users with wireless devices access to information and services. WAP 2.0 is a radical new approach that gives users a richer, advanced mobile Internet experience by integrating the latest standards and content technologies into the mobile environment. Unlike WAP 1.1, which failed to create a new language for mobile users, WAP 2.0 is a profile of existing Web specifications. Today, Opera is the only desktop browser in the market that lets users view Wireless Markup Language (WML) content, the markup language for WAP.

“WAP 2.0 is moving much closer to the Web than previous versions,” says Hakon W. Lie, CTO of Opera Software. “By introducing XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) into WAP, wireless users will have access to rich Web-based content, which Opera has long experience handling. The Opera Web browser has been thoroughly tested on the Web since 1994.”

Opera Software is the mobile Internet's market leader in providing a desktop equivalent Internet experience on handheld mobile devices, through its partnership with the leading mobile phone OEM's own software solutions company, Symbian. Opera is also available on the Windows, Mac, QNX, Linux, Solaris, EPOC, BeOS, and OS/2 platforms.

WAP 2.0 builds upon the established Internet standards such as XHTML, TCP/IP, Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP/1.1 and Transport Layer Security (TLS). Opera is committed to the standards laid out by the W3C, and as such, the Opera browser already supports 128-bit encryption, TLS 1.0, SSL 2 and 3, CSS1 and CSS2, XML, HTML 4.01, HTTP 1.1, ECMAScript, JavaScript 1.3.

 
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