SAP Research Position paper for the W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents SAP is the recognized leader in providing collaborative business solutions for all types of industries and for every major market. SAP Research Centers study IT trends and deploy new technologies in real-life environments to determine their potential business value for SAP. As a result, we are able to introduce new technology and concepts for future solutions that will be strategically important to SAP and our customers. SAP has strong interest in the field of web applications. Its Enterprise Portal [EP] makes use of the Web technologies to display the SAP portal contents on web browsers. The emergence of a multitude of devices that a portal client may have sets new requirements on the way applications must be designed, since a single User Interface (UI) design won't necessarily fit on any type of devices. In an effort to reduce the resources required for developing UI that work on technically different devices (from wired phone to desktop PCs), SAP Corporate Research conducted the Consensus project [CONSENSUS], which is an EU-FP5 research project. Together with IBM, Nokia, Ubicall, Cure and Fujitsu, the team developed a UI description language called RIML, based on a compound language of XHTML2.0, SMIL and XForms. In addition to that, the Consensus team also provided the runtime architecture based on Apache, and the UI design tools based on the Eclipse platform. The interest of SAP Research in this workshop is to provide its view from a content perspective. Indeed, SAP is the leader in the Enterprise Resources Planning field, and as such provides a wide range of applications, from Customer Relationship Management to Human Resources and travel planning. Therefore SAP has specific needs on the future possibilities of the web standards, including scripting capabilities and available widgets. SAP Research wants to bring to this workshop its knowledge acquired during the two years spent on the Consensus project. References: [EP] http://www.sap.com/solutions/netweaver/enterpriseportal/index.asp [CONSENSUS] http://www.consensus-online.org/