By Mike McMahon and Lea Anne Dobbins, Comcast Media Center
While there is no standardized source code language for EBIF, the commonly used authoring tools and compilers use XML as their source syntax. Peripheral XML standards such as XML Schema, XPath and XSLT can therefore be leveraged in validation, transformation and marshalling of EBIF source trees. Presented here is a methodology in which an arbitrary EBIF application, developed by any iTV vendor can be automatically “templatized” such that its original source tree is subsequently used to generate data driven, customized instantiations. Our ambition is to alleviate toolset incompatibility resulting from proprietary syntax, compilers and customization toolsets, thereby restoring the spirit of open standards to the end-to-end workflows associated with templating and customizing EBIF applications.