Device independent web applications - The author once - Display everywhere approach

Abstract

Building web applications for mobile and other non-desktop devices using established methods often requires a tremendous development effort. One of the major challenges is to find sound software engineering approaches enabling the cost efficient application development for multiple devices of varying technical characteristics. A new approach is to single author web content in a device independent markup language, which gets then adapted to meet the special characteristics of the accessing device. This paper describes our approach to single authoring, which was developed in the course a large European research project. The project has developed a device-independent language profile based on XHTML 2.0 and implemented a compliant rendering engine. We focus on layout and pagination capabilities of the RIML (Renderer Independent Markup Language) and show how authors can be assisted by development tools supporting device independent authoring.