Patent ID: 8245144

Claim:
A system comprising: one or more processors; one or more computer-readable storage devices; computer-executable instructions stored on the computer-readable storage devices and executable by the one or more processors to implement an application programming interface (API) to perform a method comprising: registering a namespace associated with one or more elements of a user interface, the namespace comprising a set of class types that define one or more elements of the user interface; providing markup to a parser configured to return parsed markup based on the markup provided; receiving the parsed markup from the parser, the parsed markup useful to determine one or more user interface specifications; determining, based on the parsed markup, a user interface object model (UIOM) class of objects within the namespace; generating, in response to parsing markup to determine the UIOM class of objects, one or more instances of the UIOM class of objects each having a first property inherited from a base class and a second property overridden from the base class; setting one or more other properties of the one or more instances of the UIOM class, the other properties comprising visual attributes of the instances; and creating a tree of objects that comprises the one or more instances and the base class, the tree of objects defining at least part of the user interface.