Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system – Display driving control circuitry – Controlling the condition of display elements
Reexamination Certificate
2000-05-09
2004-08-24
Cabeca, John (Department: 2173)
Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system
Display driving control circuitry
Controlling the condition of display elements
C345S215000, C345S215000, C345S215000, C715S252000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06781609
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of computer programming, and deals more particularly with a method, system, and computer program product for including information items having various media formats (such as text, image, audio, etc.) in a user interface that is specified in, and will be rendered from, a markup language document (such as an Extensible Markup Language, or “XML”, document).
2. Reservation of Copyright
A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material to which a claim of copyright protection is made. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but reserves all other rights whatsoever.
3. Description of the Related Art
The advanced user interfaces used by state-of-the-art applications often provide information using a wide variety of media, both for the user interface (UI) and for descriptive information items associated with the interface. The types of descriptive information items in common use today include tool tips; audio or visual explanations for an element presented via the UI, where these explanations may be selectable by a user; help text; hints, including “hover help” information that is provided when a user allows the cursor of a pointing device to hover over an element of a displayed UI; etc. The media types in which these descriptive items are provided may include text, video clips, graphic images, audio or speech, etc. Because these kinds of media are typically human-language specific, they are by convention stored in files which are separate from the files containing the software code of the application and/or the code from which the UI is created. This separate storage facilitates translating the stored information into different natural languages, sometimes referred to as “internationalization” of the information, without requiring changes or recompilation of the executable software. “Resource files” is a term commonly used to refer to these separately-stored media files, referring to the fact that the stored media information is used as a resource by an application program. An application typically includes a particular resource file by specifying a reference to the file system location where the resource file is stored (e.g. by providing the file system name to a compiler and/or linker utility). If multiple resource files are needed by the application, then multiple of these references are used. Resource files may be shared among multiple applications. These concepts are well known in the art.
Techniques for referencing media resource files from markup language documents are also known in the art. In the Hypertext Markup Language (“HTML”) notation, for example, the HTML syntax which specifies a Web page may include a reference to a separately-stored image, or video clip, or other type of media resource. Typically, the Web developer specifies an explicit reference to the separately-stored media resource using its Uniform Resource Locator (URL) or Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). The developer of an Extensible Markup Language (“XML”) document may also specify references to separately-stored media resources, which is also typically done by specifying a URL or URI reference. HTML and XML are both tag languages, where a tag language uses specially-designated constructs referred to as “tags” to delimit (or “mark up”) information. In the general case, a tag is a keyword that identifies what the data is which is associated with the tag, and is typically composed of a character string enclosed in special characters. “Special characters” means characters other than letters and numbers, which are defined and reserved for use with tags. Special characters are used so that a parser processing the data stream will recognize that this a tag. A tag is normally inserted preceding its associated data: a corresponding tag may also be inserted following the data, to clearly identify where that data ends. As an example of using tags, the syntax “<email>” could be used as a tag to indicate that the character string appearing in the data stream after this tag is to treated as an e-mail address; the syntax “</email>” would then be inserted after the character string, to delimit where the e-mail character string ends.
While HTML uses a predefined set of tags, the syntax of XML is extensible and allows document developers to define their own tags which may have application-specific semantics. Because of this extensibility, XML documents may be used to specify many different types of information, for use in a virtually unlimited number of contexts. (A number of XML derivative notations have been defined, and continue to be defined, for particular purposes. “VoiceXML” is an example of one such derivative. References herein to “XML” are intended to include XML derivatives and semantically similar notations such as derivatives of the Standard Generalized Markup Language, or “SGML”, from which XML was derived. Refer to ISO 8879, “Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)”, (1986) for more information on SGML. Refer to “Extensible Markup Language (XML), W3C Recommendation 10-Feb.-1998” which is available on the World Wide Web from the World Wide Web Consortium, or “W3C”, for more information on XML.)
The present invention is concerned with XML documents which are used to specify a user interface. In this UI context, XML tags may be defined which specify media resources that may be used to provide the descriptive items described above, such as help text, hints, etc. For example, if a UI has an element such as a text entry field requesting a user to enter his or her last name, this element may have an associated hint which reminds the user that this is the surname. The element may also have associated help information which provides more detailed information, such as guidance on any syntactic data entry requirements for the surname, references to other places where the surname value may have been previously entered, etc. This hint and/or help information may be rendered using text, audio, etc. A UI designer may in some cases choose to provide multiple media types for one or more of the descriptive information items associated with a particular UI element. In the surname example, the user may be given a choice of receiving the hint in audio or text format, in which case the UI XML document must specify or reference both types of media resource files.
FIG. 1
provides an example of prior-art XML syntax
100
that may be used for specifying UI information for a single UI field. In this example, a <STRING> tag pair
105
,
160
represents information for a last name, as indicated at
115
for the NAME attribute
110
. The <HINT> tag pair
120
,
130
brackets a textual hint
125
. The <HELP> tag pair
140
,
150
brackets textual help
145
which is enclosed within <META-TEXT>
142
and </META-TEXT>
147
tags. (In this example, a shortcut notation for the text within the <HINT> tag has been used, where this hint text has not been enclosed within <META-TEXT> tags.)
The techniques which exist in the prior art have a number of drawbacks, however. As will be obvious, as a UI XML document provides resource tags for more types of descriptive items, and/or more different media types for each descriptive item, the tagging in the source document becomes more verbose and cluttered, as well as more complex. The data content within the UI document may become obscured due to these multiple resource tags. In addition, a great deal of time can be expended when the developer of the UI XML document must explicitly and manually specify each type of descriptive information item to be provided for the UI content, and each media type to be provided for those items. In complex projects where one person or team develops the UI content and a different person or team develops the descriptive items, there may be a
Barker Kevin S.
Burkett Charles E.
Lection David B.
Merrick Roland A.
Bautista X. L.
Cabeca John
Doubet Marcia L.
Doudnikoff Gregory M.
Ray-Yarletts Jeanine S.
LandOfFree
Technique for flexible inclusion of information items and... does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this patent.
If you have personal experience with Technique for flexible inclusion of information items and..., we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Technique for flexible inclusion of information items and... will most certainly appreciate the feedback.
Profile ID: LFUS-PAI-O-3314291