Didier Courtaud has announced [link in French] the first European conference dedicated to UIML, an XML vocabulary to describe user interfaces independently of the device where they will be presented.

Organized by Aristote, the aim of this conference is to promote the usage of UIML in Europe and the designers of this language (Virginia Tech University and Harmonia, Inc) will deliver tutorials, presentations and demonstrations with the support of European users and of the University Evry Val d'Essonne (France).

Derived from prior works started in late 1996, the current release is UIML 2.0, an XML vocabulary allowing a generic description of user interfaces and the definition of the mapping between this description and the specific implementations.

UIML appears then to be both more generic (supporting non-W3C specifications such as WML) and more focused (describing only the interface without modeling data models nor the methods and protocol) than W3C XForms (recently published as a W3C Working Draft.)

Answering to a question on XMLfr xml-tech mailing list, Didier Courtaud said nevertheless [link in French] that UIML 2.0 "is currently submitted to the W3C as part of their XForms initiative".

Other story:

• First complete draft of XForms published