XUP: XML universal presentation

This dissertation proposes XML Universal Presentation (XUP) as a solution for creating an interactive and independent user interface system for the Web community. XUP is a rich user interface system for presenting information on the Web, which should make it both faster and far more interesting for users, including those with handheld devices and network-enabled phones. XUP offers several advantages. First, it offers an interactive Web document that provides the ability to interact without reloading the presentation part. Second, XUP furnishes a device—and platform—independent user interface system. Third, XUP promotes the separation of data content, logic and presentation. This allows XUP systems to deal with much less raw data than Web downloads typically produce today.{09}Fourth, XUP allows much more control over a view of information received from the Web. It allows the user interface to have different views of the same data content and varied controls of the same view. Fifth, XUP provides a client-side user interface that can independently exchange data contents with a back-end processing server, regardless of the data structure. Therefore, XUP can be used to integrate with any external XML document without changing the user interface. Finally, XUP is usable by non-programmers. It offers a rapid, flexible prototyping tool and Integrated Development Environment for creating XUP user interfaces. XUP significantly reduces software complexity and enormously enhances maintainability as well.; This dissertation's contributions are: (1) a portable client-side user interface that can be used across multiple platforms and devices (2) a rich user interface with extensive interactivity, which allow its reuse; (3) minimization of the amount of data transferred over the Web and a reduction in the number of network round trips to the server; (4) support for rapid application development; and (5) the ability to simplify software maintenance.