A framework for coordinated multi-modal browsing with multiple clients

Abstract

As users acquire or gain access to an increasingly diverse range of web access clients, web applications are adapting their user interfaces to support multiple modalities on multiple client types. User experiences can be enhanced by clients with differing capabilities combining to provide a distributed user interface to applications. Indeed, users will be frustrated if their interaction with applications is limited to one client at a time.This paper discusses the requirements for coordinating web interaction across an aggregation of clients. We present a framework for multi-device browsing that provides both coordinated navigation between web resources and coordinated interaction between variants, or representations, of those resources once instantiated in the clients. The framework protects the application from some of the complexities of client aggregation.We show how a small number of enhancements to the XForms and XML Events vocabularies can facilitate coordination between clients and provide an appropriate level of control to applications. We also describe a novel proxy which consolidates HTTP requests from aggregations of clients and reduces the burden that multi-client browsing places on the application.