This year marks 20 years since I co-organized the Workshop on User Interface Description Languages (UIDLs) during the Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, held in Gallipoli, Italy (May 25–28, 2004). Together with Marc Abrams, Jean Vanderdonckt, and Quentin Limbourg, we created an event that surpassed all expectations in terms of attendance, engagement, and the quality of contributions.
The early 2000s were a transformative period for the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Researchers and practitioners alike were grappling with the challenge of building flexible, reusable, and context-aware user interfaces (UIs) that could adapt to the growing variety of devices and use cases. XML, with its ability to structure and abstract information, became the language of choice for UIDLs.
Our workshop featured innovative contributions on topics such as device-independent authoring, multimodal interfaces, and model-driven development. Frameworks like UIML and USIXML embodied a vision of enabling developers to create user interfaces that were not only functional but also easily portable across platforms and capable of evolving alongside technological advances.
At the time, XML was revolutionizing UI engineering by separating the structure of UIs from their presentation and logic. This inspired a wave of innovation, including Microsoft’s XAML, which demonstrated an even deeper integration of UI description with the underlying software stack. All of this research helped to lay the groundwork for many of the flexible, declarative UI frameworks we take for granted today.
Revisiting these proceedings after two decades is both nostalgic and inspiring. The discussions, papers, and ideas captured in these proceedings remain a testament to how cutting-edge this topic was in 2004. The full proceedings are available in this pdf.
If you would like to cite these proceedings or work that was included in there, here is the BibTeX entry for the proceedings:
@proceedings{luytenetal-uixml2004,
year = {2004},
title = {Developing User Interfaces with XML: Advances on User Interface Description Languages},
editor = {Luyten, Kris and Abrams, Marc and Vanderdonckt, Jean and Limbourg, Quentin},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on User Interface Description Languages, held at the Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces},
eventdate = {2004-05-25},
venue = {Gallipoli, Italy},
publisher = {Similar},
note = {Workshop proceedings}
}
.