This article is designed to help anyone developing a WML site. Particularly those of you that have already experienced the delightfully ambiguous “Sorry The requested item could not be loaded!” message shown by the Sony Ericsson WML browser. I searched the internet high and low for a solution, and heard tales of server’s mime-type settings, O2 walled gardens and Sony Ericssons being incompatible with WML 1.1, but found nothing of any use. Then I sussed it.
How? Why?
It’s very simple: the Sony Ericsson WML browser is more stringent than a sexually-frustrated, cane-wielding headmistress first thing in the morning. It appears to me that it parses the WML page, validates it against the WML doctype and if it fails on any count, refuses to even attempt to display the content.
Any of the following will cause the “Sorry The requested item could not be loaded!” error:
size attribute on a select elementaccesskey attribute on a linkcti attribute (and i-mode handset specific attribute) on a phone number link<p><p>Hello</p></p>I actually think it’s rather admirable from a standards point of view, however the inability to specify things like accesskeys is a slight pain, as most modern (non Sony Ericsson) handsets actually support the functionality. Using WML 2.0 (that includes accesskeys in the Doctype) would be a sensible solution if we want to include more advanced markup, but not all handsets support WML 2.0, and given the trouble I’ve had getting 1.1 to work across different handsets, I don’t want to start on 2.0 just yet!
It’s a pretty straightforward problem, and it seems that Sony Ericsson handsets are the only ones that exhibit this strict behaviour, so I was (and remain) very surprised that there’s no discussion of this elsewhere on the web. So if you’re having this problem, and this article has helped, then you’re welcome, and good luck.
Footnote: This applies, as far as I’m aware to (at least, the) Sony Ericsson K750i, K610i and W600i.
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Oh God yes. I love my Sony Ericsson phone, but the browser is just far too strict. When you’re browsing on your cellphone, you don’t want to know if a site’s done something wrong. Leave that for when you’re on a computer.
But luckily, there’s Opera Mini, which’ll work until Firefox releases something ‘mini’.
I have faced the same problem but is there a solution for this? Is there no tool that can tell me where I have gone wrong?