UIML stands for User Interface Markup Language and is an application of XML to describe user interfaces. Normally people think of using XML for describing documents or data, but it is just a formalism it may be used for any kind of structured data. There are tools which convert an UIML representation to the representation for various GUIs (e.g. Java's AWT).
The goal is to create an open standard user interface description language in XML that can be freely implemented by anyone. The motivation is to facilitate better tools for creation of user interfaces that work on any platform available today, but which also will allow today's legacy user interfaces to evolve to new forms for use on platforms that are created years from now.
Work started in 1997 to define a canonical meta-language that can describe any user interface in a manner that is device-independent and user interface metaphor independent. UIML can describe user interfaces that are popular today -- for traditional desktop, web, mobile, embedded, and voice applications. UIML can also describe user interface for custom devices or devices that are invented in the future. For developers using multi-tier development, UIML describes the presentation layer.
Today, UIML is being standardized by OASIS.
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