User interface description languages for next generation user interfaces

Abstract

In recent years HCI researchers have developed a broad range of new interfaces that diverge from the "window, icon, menu, pointing device" (WIMP) paradigm, employing a variety of novel interaction techniques and devices. Developers of these next generation user interfaces face challenges that are currently not addressed by state of the art user interface software tools. As part of the user interface software community's effort to address these challenges, the concept of a User Interface Description Language (UIDL), reemerge as a promising approach. To date, the UIDL research area has demonstrated extensive development, mainly targeting multi-platform and multi-modal user interfaces. However, many open questions remain regarding the usefulness and effectiveness of UIDLs in supporting the development of next generation interfaces. The aim of this workshop is to bring together both developers of next generation user interfaces and UIDL researchers in an effort to identify key challenges facing this community, to jointly develop new approaches aimed at solving these challenges and finally to consider future spaces for UIDL research.

ICOs

“…This typically requires from the UIDL the possibility to represent chains of event flows and the possibility to compose low-level events, into higher-level ones (for instance, the sequence of (up, down, up, down) events would be composed in a doubleclick one, provided that the input device has not been moved 1 In these state-of-the-art tables, we refer to the original paper rather than the most recent one. Indeed, in Jacob [1986] there is no reference to tangible interaction but that early work has been extended in Shaer and Jacob [2005] to such interaction. This is why Jacob [1986] appears in Table III.…”

“…The tool support aspect defines whether web sites or papers contain a Snapshot of the application (like the Shadow [Jacob 1986] snapshot in Shaer and Jacob [2005]), if a "Demo" of the application is available on a Web site, such …”

Reflecting on the Design and Implementation Issues of Virtual Environments

“…Schön, 1983, p. 61 Virtual environment design and implementation (VEDI) has long been known to be demanding by its practitioners. Evidence for this is seen in the workshops focused on aspects of VEDI in the early and mid-1990's (Green & Jacob, 1991;Herndon, Van Dam, & Gleicher, 1994) as well as a more recent CHI workshop (Shaer, Jacob, Green, & Luyten, 2008) and the SEARIS series of workshops at IEEE Virtual Reality (2008, 2009) and OOPSLA (2009. Additionally, several important papers have been written through the years commenting on specific VEDI issues; some examples include: VE specification (Jacob, Deligiannidis, & Morrison, 1999), difficulties of interface design and implementation (Myers, 1993), issues with callback architectures (Myers, 1991), and issues with reuse and toolkit death (Steed, 2008).…”

User interface extensible markup language

“…Some representative examples of UIDLs include, but are not limited to: UIML [5], UsiXML [6], XIML [2]. Various UIDLs have been subject to discussion [7], understanding their common ground and their subsumed approach [9], and a comparative analysis [4]. Although these actions have shed a new light on UIDL problems, there is no consensus on the right abstractions to define in order to cover various challenges posed by UI development life cycle.…”