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Extensibility and Reusability of Web User Interface Components using XICL

Jair C. Leite, Lirisnei Gomes de Sousa


Abstract

Markup languages have proven successful and relatively easy at describing application user interfaces (UI). However, the most of markup user interface languages does not provide extensibility and reusability facilities to the creation of new and more powerful Web (browserbased) User Interface components. Developing new UI components using DHTML is a very hard work because of the lack of standardized models and application programming interfaces. Our work proposes XICL, an extensible XML-based markup language to user interface developments. XICL is a UI description language that provides extensibility and reusability of UI components. Using the XICL, it is possible to describe user interfaces and to develop new UI components to browser-based software applications. This language also defines a description format and a semantic model that standardizes UI components development to promote reusability and extensibility. The output of the XICL translation is a DHTML code the W3C recommended technologies that can run in every browser that follows that recommendation.
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