Patent ID: 7023989

Claim:
A network-enabled user interface device, the device including: a display screen configured for displaying display elements; a user input interface configured for supplying user inputs; an interface controller configured for receiving application-based commands for at least one of first operations, second operations, and third operations, the interface controller configured for causing the display screen to display the display elements based on the first operations, configuring the user input interface for selected input operations based on the second operations, and generating application-based responses based on the supplied user inputs and the third operations; and an application controller configured for communication with executable application operations having generated the application-based commands and selectively transferring the application-based responses to selected ones of the executable application operations, the application controller including a network interface configured for receiving the application-based commands and outputting selected ones of the application-based responses via an open protocol network; wherein the interface controller further includes: (1) an extensible markup language (XML) module configured for generating first identifiers specifying the display elements to be displayed and second identifiers specifying the input operations to be performed by the user input interface, based on parsing selected XML documents based on the application-based commands, the selected XML documents configured for specifying the first operations, the second operations and the third operations; and (2) a graphic user interface (GUI) elements table configured for storing available interface elements including the display elements and input elements, the GUI elements table configured for outputting the identified display elements specified in the first identifier for display on the display screen, and outputting selected input elements selected based on the second identifiers for configuration of the user input interface for the selected input operations.