DIAL
Thanks to an anonymous poster for pointing me towards the first public release of a working draft for the W3C’s Device Independent Authoring Language. This was released by the Device Independence Working Group four days ago.
DIAL may possibly be the UIDL (User Interface Description Language) I’ve been looking for. It does seem to be quite content focussed rather that UI focussed like something like UIML, but it might do the job. Being W3C recommendation will be a huge bonus. It is based on elements from existing xml formats like XHTML(2) but also XForms, which has some very interesting features. (see the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (not W3C) for an alternative take.)
RFC: Device Independent Web Server
Suggestion:
Each web “page” is stored on the server as a DIAL document. A page is requested by its name and a client-specified extension (e.g. .xhtml, .svg, .x3d, .voicexml, .xul), usually with an HTTP GET. The server first performs any server-side scripting, then performs a server-side transformation on the output using XSLT with an XSL stylesheet to return a document in that format. If a stylesheet for the requested extension does not exist, a .dial document is passed to the client which can attempt to perform a client-side transformation or return an error.
Questions:
Could this same DIAL document also be bound/translated/tranformed into a GTK or similar user interface using something other than XSLT?
Could an XMLHTTPRequest type request be sent to the server and the server return a fragment which is either pre-transformed on the server or transformed on the client into a suitable format?
Is this RESTful?
DISCLAIMER: I have been drinking whisky