Patent ID: 8307045

Claim:
A method for generating service/device-specific templates, the method comprising: at a computer communicatively coupled to a storage device and a user interface, an application running on the computer performing a plurality of steps, in the following order: the application receiving or retrieving unformatted data from the storage device, the unformatted data corresponding to a specific data service and contains no information on formatting the specific data service for presentation; the application examining the unformatted data for the specific data service to identify name-value pairs which are present in the unformatted data, each name-value pair including a name of a data item and a value of the data item; the application presenting the name-value pairs identified from the unformatted data for the specific data service to a user via the user interface; the presenting further comprising: presenting the user with a label for each of the set of the name-value pairs; and allowing the user to accept or modify the label via the user interface; the application retaining a set of the name-value pairs based on user input received via the user interface; the application selecting, for each of the plurality of devices, individual template building blocks from a master template, the master template does not convert unformatted data into formatted data, the master template containing information defining a style for presentation of different types of data on a plurality of devices, the information being in the master template as a plurality of template building blocks, each of the plurality of template building blocks defining formatting for a single type of name-value pair for presentation on a single device type, and each of the individual template building blocks being selected based on a corresponding type of name-value pair in the set of the name-value pairs; and the application assembling the individual template building blocks selected from the master template into one or more service/device-specific templates, each of the service/device-specific templates assembled by the application being specific to a corresponding device or a device type and to the specific data service associated with the unformatted data, the one or more service/device-specific templates being necessary to generate formatting for the set of name-value pairs such that data items associated with the specific service are suitable for presentation on the plurality of devices.