XICL — An Extensible Mark-up Language for Developing User Interface and Components

  • Lirisnei Gomes de Sousa
  • Jair C. Leite
Conference paper

Abstract

The development of browser-based User Interface (UI) components is important to enhance Web Systems Usability. There are several solutions to the development of UI components. Some of them are proprietary and requires specific high-cost development tools and run-time plug-in. DHTML — the W3C client-side recommended technologies — provides resources to the development of new UI components. However, the development of new UI components using DHTML is a very hard work because of the lack of standardised models and application programming interfaces. Reusability and Extensibility is also very difficult to achieve. This work presents the XICL, a mark-up language to describe user interfaces and UI components. This language defines a description format and a semantic model that standardises UI components development. XICL is based on DHTML and follows the component-based software development paradigm to promote reuse, extension and portability. We also present the XICL Studio, a development environment composed of an editor, a library of components and a compiler.

Keywords

DHTML Mark-up languages User interface components User interface specification methods and languages Web-based interfaces 

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Copyright information

© Kluwer Academic Publishers 2005

Authors and Affiliations

  • Lirisnei Gomes de Sousa
    • 1
  • Jair C. Leite
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of Informatics and Applied MathematicsFederal Univ. of Rio Grande do NorteNatalBrazil

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