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Web User Interaction – a Declarative Approach Based on XForms

Mikko Honkala

Dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Science in Technology to be presented with due permission of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering for public examination and debate in Auditorium T2 at Helsinki University of Technology (Espoo, Finland) on the 12th of January, 2007, at 12 noon.

Overview in PDF format (ISBN 978-951-22-8566-2)   [1482 KB]
Dissertation is also available in print (ISBN 978-951-22-8565-5)

Abstract

This thesis studies next-generation web user interaction definition languages, as well as browser software architectures. The motivation comes from new end-user requirements for web applications: demand for higher interaction, adaptation for mobile and multimodal usage, and rich multimedia content. At the same time, there is a requirement for non-programmers to be able to author, customize, and maintain web user interfaces.

Current user interface tools do not support well these new kinds of requirements. Thus, the main research problem of this Thesis is the definition of a device and modality independent model for high-interaction web user interfaces.

This Thesis proposes a set of criteria for user interface tools, and evaluates current tools against the criteria. It proposes a taxonomy of tools based on authoring style, consisting of procedural, declarative and hybrid tools. Based on an analysis, declarative languages are chosen, the main advantage being higher semantic level, which enables ease-of-authoring and adaptation based on context of use, current device, and user's preferences.

A layered model, consisting of mostly declarative languages, is proposed. It is composed of well-defined, and proven XML languages, and is divided into layers. The abstract UI layer contains, among others, interaction, document structure, and security, and is modality independent. The modality-dependent layer allows more detailed control over the renderings for each modality, such as visual and aural. It is shown that it is possible to automatically produce multimodal user interfaces from a single declarative user interface definition using the proposed model. This thesis focuses specifically on user interaction, where the use of XForms language is proposed. The author has co-specified the XForms language in the World Wide Web Consortium. In the proposed model, procedural scripting is only used to provide specialized modality-specific widgets in a reusable manner.

Finally, as a proof-of-concept, this thesis describes the author's implementation of the proposed model. The implementation is part of the open-source X-Smiles user agent and includes full implementations of most of the proposed languages and techniques.

This thesis consists of an overview and of the following 9 publications:

  1. Mikko Honkala and Petri Vuorimaa. XForms in X-Smiles. Journal of World Wide Web, Internet and Web Information Systems, 4 (3), 2001, pages 151-166. © 2001 Springer Science+Business Media. By permission.
  2. Kari Pihkala, Mikko Honkala, and Petri Vuorimaa. A Browser Framework for Hybrid XML Documents. Proceedings of the 6th IASTED International Conference on Internet and Multimedia Systems and Applications (IMSA 2002), Kauai, Hawaii, USA, August, 2002, pages 164-169. © 2002 International Association of Science and Technology for Development (IASTED). By permission.
  3. John Boyer and Mikko Honkala. The XForms Computation Engine: Rationale, Theory and Implementation Experience. Proceedings of the 6th IASTED International Conference on Internet and Multimedia Systems and Applications (IMSA 2002), Kauai, Hawaii, USA, August, 2002, pages 196-204. © 2002 International Association of Science and Technology for Development (IASTED). By permission.
  4. Mikko Pohja, Mikko Honkala, and Petri Vuorimaa. An XHTML 2.0 Implementation. Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2004), Munich, Germany, July, 2004, pages 402-415. © 2004 Springer Science+Business Media. By permission.
  5. Mikko Honkala and Petri Vuorimaa. A Configurable XForms Implementation. Proceedings of the IEEE Sixth International Symposium on Multimedia Software Engineering (MSE 2004), Miami, FL, USA, December, 2004, pages 232-239. © 2004 IEEE. By permission.
  6. Mikko Honkala, Pablo Cesar, and Petri Vuorimaa. A Device Independent XML User Agent for Multimedia Terminals. Proceedings of the IEEE Sixth International Symposium on Multimedia Software Engineering (MSE 2004), Miami, FL, USA, December, 2004, pages 116-123. © 2004 IEEE. By permission.
  7. Mikko Honkala and Petri Vuorimaa. Secure Web Forms with Client-Side Signatures. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2005), Sydney, Australia, July, 2005, pages 340-347. © 2005 Springer Science+Business Media. By permission.
  8. Mikko Pohja, Mikko Honkala, Miemo Penttinen, Petri Vuorimaa, and Panu Ervamaa. Web User Interaction – Comparison of Declarative Approaches. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2006), Setbal, Portugal, April, 2006, pages 295-302. © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media. By permission.
  9. Mikko Honkala and Mikko Pohja. Multimodal Interaction with XForms. Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2006), Palo Alto, California, USA, July, 2006, pages 201-208. © 2006 by authors.

Errata of publications 1 and 7

Keywords: XML, user interfaces, user interaction, XForms, UIDL, XHTML

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© 2007 Helsinki University of Technology

Last update 2011-05-26