The usage of computing systems has evolved dramatically over the last years. Starting from a low level procedural usage, in which a process for executing one or several tasks is carried out, computers now tend to be used in a problem oriented way. Future computer usage will be more centered around particular services, and will not be focused on platforms or applications. These services should be independent of the technology used to interact with them. In this paper an approach will be presented which provides a uniform interface to such services, with- out any dependence on modality, platform or programming language. Through the usage of general user interface descriptions, presented in XML, and converted using XSLT, a uniform framework is presented for runtime migration of user interfaces. As a consequence, future services will become easily extensible for all kinds of devices and modalities. An implementation serving as a proof of concept, a runtime conversion of a joystick in a 3D virtual environment into a 2D dialog-based user interface, is developed.

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In this paper we describe how a component-based approach can be combined with a user interface (UI) description language to get more flexible and adaptable UIs for embedded systems and mobile com- puting devices. We envision a new approach for building adaptable user interfaces for embedded systems, which can migrate from one device to another. Adaptability to the device constraints is especially important for adding reusability and extensibility to UIs for embedded systems: this way they are ready to keep pace with new technologies.

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In a time where mobile computing devices and embedded systems gain importance, too much time is spent to reinventing user interfaces for each new device. To enhance future extensibility and reusability of systems and their user interfaces we propose a runtime user interface description language, which can cope with constraints found in embedded systems and mobile computing devices. XML seems to be a suitable tool to do this, when combined with Java. Following the evolution of Java towards XML, it is logical to introduce the concept applied to mobile computing devices and embedded systems.

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