UNIVERSAL INFORMATION APPLIANCE WITH PARSER

A universal information appliance (UIA) such as can be embodied by a personal digital assistant (PDA) can receive an application written in a new "MoDAL" language, parse the application to divide it into binary-formatted GUI elements, and then dynamically render a GUI interface on the display of the UIA based on the GUI elements parsed out of the application. The user can further modify the GUI and save it. With this combination, a GUI can be easily and dynamically tailored for a wide range of user needs, including the needs of handicapped users. The UIA communicates data in an onboard data cache with globally shared, associatively addressed memory spaces such as "TSpaces".