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Formal methods have already been shown to improve the development process and quality assurance in system design and implementation. This volume examines whether these benefits also apply to the field of human-computer interface design and implementation, and whether formal methods can offer useful support in usability evaluation and obtaining more reliable implementations of user requirements. Its main aim is to compare the different approaches and examine which particular type of implementation and problem each one is best suited to. To enable the reader to compare and contrast the approaches as easily as possible, each one is applied to the same case study: the specification of an ideal Netscape-like web browser and html page server. The resulting volume will provide invaluable reading for final year undergraduate and postgraduate courses on user interfaces, user interface design, and applications of formal methods.
List of contents
I Modelling Techniques.- 1 Specifying History and Backtracking Mechanisms.- 2 How to Model a Web (Without Getting Tangled in Nets).- 3 Software Architecture Modelling: Bridging Two Worlds Using Ergonomics and Software Properties.- 4 A Formal Approach to Consistency and Reuse of Links in World Wide Web Applications.- 5 Using Declarative Descriptions to Model User Interfaces with Mastermind.- II Approaches to the Formal Specification.- 6 XTL: A Temporal Logic for the Formal Development of Interactive Systems.- 7 Interaction Object Graphs: An Executable Graphical Notation for Specifying User Interfaces.- 8 Specifying a Web Browser Interface Using Object-Z.- 9 Modelling Clients and Servers on the Web Using Interactive Cooperative Objects.- 10 Development of a WWW Browser Using TADEUS.- 11 Algebraic Specification of a World Wide Web Application Using GRALPLA.- III Approaches to the Formal Evaluation.- 12 TLIM, a Systematic Method for the Design of Interactive Systems.- 13 Electronic Gridlock, Information Saturation and the Unpredictability of Information Retrieval over the World Wide Web.- 14 From Formal Models to Empirical Evaluation and Back Again.- 15 A Component-Based Approach Applied to a Netscape-Like Browser.- References.- The Web Browser Case Study.- Index of Key Words.- Index of Authors.
