A WAP gateway sits between mobile devices using the WAP

Wireless Application Protocol

Wireless Application Protocol 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 uses the protocol.Before the introduction of WAP, mobile service providers had limited opportunities to offer...

 protocol and the World Wide Web

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

, passing pages from one to the other much like a proxy. This translates pages into a form suitable for the mobiles, for instance using the Wireless Markup Language

Wireless Markup Language

Wireless Markup Language , based on XML, is a markup language intended for devices that implement the Wireless Application Protocol specification, such as mobile phones. It provides navigational support, data input, hyperlinks, text and image presentation, and forms, much like HTML...

 (WML). This process is hidden from the phone, so it may access the page in the same way as a browser accesses HTML, using a URL

Uniform Resource Locator

In computing, a uniform resource locator or universal resource locator is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource....

(for example, http://example.com/foo.wml), provided the mobile phone operator has not specifically prevented this.