Patent ID: 7398472

Claim:
A system for defining at least one visual-display characteristic of at least one user-interface control, the system comprising: a dialog template that specifies at least one style selector for the at least one user-interface control, wherein the style selector includes at least one of: (1) a tag name, and (2) a tag name and a class attribute; a transformation module that extracts the at least one style selector from the dialog template; a style sheet that defines at least one visual-display-characteristic value that is applicable to the at least one user-interface control and that is associated with the at least one style selector; a style sheet-parsing engine that uses the at least one style selector to retrieve the at least one visual-display-characteristic value from the style sheet; and a user-interface-control-drawing module that draws the at least one user-interface control in accordance with the at least one visual-display-characteristic value retrieved by the style sheet-parsing engine.