Thursday
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
John "Scooter" Morris
Scott Stanfield
Mark Finkle
Speakers:
Scott Stanfield, Vertigo Software
Mark Finkle, Mozilla Corporation
Organizer:
John "Scooter" Morris, UCSF
XML-based user interface description languages are now in wide deployment: Adobe's Flex provides an XML-based language (MXML); Microsoft has released WPF, which supports XAML; and Mozilla's Firefox (and other products) supports XUL. These lanugages (as well as UIML and UsiXML) all share common characteristics: they are XML-based, they can be used to specify a user interface, and they can be "compiled" into a user interface that only requires some form of "glue" code to link elements and provide behaviors that are dependent on other elements. For HCI professionals, these languages provide us with an opportunity to prototype user interfaces and hand those prototypes off to be directly integrated into the functioning system. This provides a cleaner separation of concerns, but also allows the interaction designer/engineer to become a more integral part of the iterations in the development cycle.
This session will feature presentations by experts on XAML and XUL. Each presenter will outline their language and where that language is used, focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of their environment. Then each presenter will build a "toy" user interface that will be provided to them in advance using their respective languages. The session will end with a brief opportunity for each presenter to extol the virtues of their approach and significant time for audience Q&A.
WARNING: not for the faint of heart -- this session may actually show *code* on the screen!