Synchronizing Web Documents with Style

In this paper we report on our efforts to define a set of document extensions to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that allow for structured timing and synchronization of elements within a Web page. Our work considers the scenario in which the temporal structure can be decoupled from the content of the Web page in a similar way that CSS does with the layout, colors and fonts. Based on the SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) temporal model we propose CSS document extensions and discuss the design and implementation of a proof of concept that realizes our contributions. As HTML5 seems to move away from technologies like Flash and XML (eXtensible Markup Language), we believe our approach provides a flexible declarative solution to specify rich media experiences that is more aligned with current Web practices

Collaborating with Wikis

{Excerpt} As the internet revolution presses on, computer-mediated communications through social (conversational) technologies also seem to advance every day. (Social sites such as MySpace and Facebook, commercial sites such as Amazon.com and eBay, and media sites such as Flickr and YouTube, to name a few applications, have become verypopular.) Given the fast-rising number of these technologies ,the confused might recall that people form online communities by combining one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many communication modes. The commonality is that all tap the power of new information and communication technologies and the resultant interconnectivity to facilitate engagement, collaboration, and sharing of tacit knowledge. Wikis are one such form of social technology, designed to enable anyone with access to contribute or modify content using a simplified markup language. They are used to create and power collaborative websites. Some believe that such open, peering, sharing, and global tools ring the death knell of old-school, inwardly focused, self-contained corporations

Framework for the declarative implementation of native mobile applications

The development of connected mobile applications for a broad audience is a complex task because of the existing device diversity. In order to soothe this situation, device-independent approaches are aimed at implementing platform-independent applications, hiding the differences among the diverse families and models of mobile devices. Most of the existing approaches are based on the imperative definition of applications, which are either compiled to a native application, or executed in a Web browser. The client and server sides of applications are implemented separately, using different mechanisms for data synchronisation. In this study, the authors propose device-independent mobile application generation (DIMAG), a framework for defining native device-independent client-server applications based on the declarative specification of application workflow, state and data synchronisation, user interface and data queries. The authors have designed DIMAG considering the dynamic addition of new types of devices, and facilitating the generation of applications for new target platforms. DIMAG has been implemented taking advantage of existing standard

Proof in Context -- Web Editing with Rich, Modeless Contextual Feedback

The Agora system is a prototypical Wiki for formal mathematics: a web-based system for collaborating on formal mathematics, intended to support informal documentation of formal developments. This system requires a reusable proof editor component, both for collaborative editing of documents, and for embedding in the resulting documents. This paper describes the design of Agora's asynchronous editor, that is generic enough to support different tools working on editor content and providing contextual information, with interactive theorem proverss being a special, but important, case described in detail for the Coq theorem prover.Comment: In Proceedings UITP 2012, arXiv:1307.152

Nimbus A Novel Multi-Device Operating System Shell

Web technologies have advanced considerably in the last decade. With the introduction of HTML5 and CSS3 web standards, websites are no longer static documents, but rich applications that are capable of rivaling those written in native code. Similarly, internet infrastructure and adoption has reached a point where always connected and cross-platform applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Drive, Spotify, Dropbox, and Youtube are becoming dominant. While these web applications have acclimated users to cross-platform and cross-device experiences, operating systems have lagged behind, offering subpar experiences across devices. We present the design, prototype implementation, and evaluation of Nimbus, an operating system shell built on web technologies that aims to provide a compelling cross-platform and cross-device OS experience. We demonstrate how Nimbus can be used to create a seamless user experiences across platforms through realtime synchronization of application data and UI interactions. We also examine the advantages and disadvantages of implementing Nimbus as an OS shell, rather than a standalone cloud operating system, such as Jolicloud or Google Chrome. Nimbus is a disruptive approach to designing an operating system shell that allows developers to easily create multi-device applications that provide seamless experiences for users across all of their devices

Analysis and design of a subtitling system for ambient intelligence environments

The development of ubiquitous applications for ambient intelligence environments needs to also take into account some usability and accessibility issues in order to ensure a proper user experience and to overcome the existing content access barriers. A proper access to video subtitles, for instance, is not always available due to the technical limitations of traditional video packaging, transmission and presentation. New Web standards enable more featured applications with better multi-platform definition, so they are suitable for building ubiquitous applications for ambient intelligence environments. This work presents a video subtitling system that enables the customization and adaptation of subtitles. The benefits of Web applications compared with device-specific native applications for building the solution as well as its current platform support are analyzed. Finally, three different application use cases are presented