A Generic Model for Dialog Specification

This article deals with the dialog specification for interactive applications. Most of existing models are based on transition diagrams, but they give too attention to implementation considerations. Therefore, we reconunend a new model completely independent of any implcmentation problem. The dialog is broken down into a serics of queries, responses, results. This generic model is the main tool for the dialog specification in EREDlA, a new integrated environment for the user interface development of interactive applications. EREDIA discerns three steps: design, which is the definition of the logical dialog, layout which is the translation of the logical dialog into the physical dialog dcdicatcd to an access method and programming which is the integration of thc application functions. EREDIA is a friendliness environment, it takes into account the graphical aspects of thc generic model on bit-mapped workstations.