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Device- and Modality-Independent Authoring

It was an initial requirement for the MONA project that application authors should at no point during the authoring process be concerned with device specific issues. They should specify their user interfaces on an abstract level and provide hints that allow automatic adaptation of the content by the presentation server. These hints include priority levels for different widgets and their contents, pagination hints, voice-dialog hints and “flexible” layout rules that are interpreted by an algorithm which optimizes the GUI layout for each specific device during runtime.

The MONAEditor

The MONAEditor, in its current state, is a basic rapid prototyping environment for user interfaces based on the markup language we have developed. It is implemented in Java, based on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. The main work area consists of three views (see Fig. 1).
  • A tree view depicting the hierarchical structure of user interface components and grouping elements.
  • An attribute/behaviour table showing all attributes associated to the currently selected user interface component or grouping element.
  • A markup source code view.
All views are synchronized, i.e. selecting a user interface component in the tree view will automatically highlight and scroll to the corresponding code section in the source code view and show the corresponding attributes/behaviours in the attribute/behaviour table. Navigating through the source code will also automatically select the corresponding element in the tree and update the attribute/behaviour table accordingly.

Different device emulators (including a Symbian UIQ smartphone and two different WML phones) offer a real-time preview of the GUI. Furthermore, a voice-enabled PDA emulator allows a multimodal preview. A simple visual representation of the voice dialog is also available. A more sophisticated editing view for viewing/creating and manipulating the voice dialog directly, is under development.

Standard Conformance

As the next major development step of our work, we see the harmonization of our experimental language with established markup standards. Our main interest for a future version of the MONAEditor is therefore the harmonization of the underlying markup language with W3C activites. XHTML, XForms and Cascading Stylesheets, supplemented by a small number of extensions, will be the basis for the new core language format of the MONAEditor. A "standards-based" version of the MONAEditor is currently under development.