The presentations in this section appear in the Proceedings but are not yet online in any common
location. Links to related material have been added wherever possible.
UIML: An Appliance-Independent XML User Interface Language
"Today's Internet appliances feature user interface technologies almost unknown a few years ago: touch
screens, styli, handwriting and voice recognition, speech synthesis, tiny screens, and more. This
richness creates problems. First, different appliances use different languages: WML for cell phones;
SpeechML, JSML, and VoxML for voice enabled devices such as phones; HTML and XUL for
desktop computers, and so on. Thus, developers must maintain multiple source code families to deploy
interfaces to one information system on multiple appliances. Second, user interfaces differ dramatically
in complexity (e.g, PC versus cell phone interfaces). Thus, developers must also manage interface
content. Third, developers risk writing appliance-specific interfaces for an appliance that might not be
on the market tomorrow. A solution is to build interfaces with a single, universal language free of
assumptions about appliances and interface technology.
This paper introduces such a language, the
User Interface Markup Language (UIML), an XML-compliant language. UIML insulates the interface
designer from the peculiarities of different appliances through style sheets. A measure of the power of
UIML is that it can replace hand-coding of Java AWT or Swing user interfaces."
This talk by Michael Los described the employee phonebook portion of
Mitre's Information Infrastructure (MII).
The system is based on XML, XSL and a JPython script engine.
Employee information is served from a database and formatted using XSL for display.
Different different styles are selectable by the end user.
Keith Visco mentioned a free XSL processor called
XSL:P.
XPages: Enterprise Level XML/XSL Based Web Technology
Norbert Miklua is the CTO of DataChannel and of
OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards).
XPages
is the next generation of Enterprise Information Portals (EIP).
It is an enterprise level XML/XSL based web technology that also
uses the DOM and XML-Data (a Microsoft W3C Note, more or less obsoleted by the XML Schema Working Group efforts).
With XPages, URLs define all actions, such as executing a method on the DOM.
Navigation of the DOM is by means of named attributes which map to directory or file names on the web server.
XPages is the core of DataChannel's RIO 4.0
Enterprise Information Portal,
due for beta release in June 1999, with FCS 3Q1999.
Inso's XSL Style Editor
Sharon Adler, Director of Product Management at Inso,
presented the prototype of an XSL stylesheet editor that allows a user to generate both XSL and CSS style sheets.
In addition, the user can
develop an XSL Transform (XSLT) stylesheet and the associated XML result document.
Sharon discussed the design approach and issues in style editor development.
