Image format: Images for the WML pages are stored in WBMP, a single
bit-plane graphics interchange format, which can also be termed as the WAP
bitmap format. It is a simple format that defines single bits for basic
black and white images.
Although the WAP Forum's stated direction is that the WBMP will support
greyscale and colour images in the near future, the current standard does
not. This format WBMP is, for the moment, limited to two colours: black and
the white (transparent). A WBMP graphic features 1-bit colour (either black
or white) and, unlike the popular GIF and JPEG formats prevalent on the Web,
is not compressed.
The size of a WBMP graphic cannot exceed 1,461 bytes because of memory
limitations on current-generation WAP phones. Another constraint is the very
limited size of the displays found on current phones. The microbrowsers on
mobile phones don't allow any scrolling of graphics, so a single image that
doesn't fit on a phone's tiny screen won't be displayed at all. Various free
tools are available for converting different image formats to WBMP.
