An industrial control user interface provides a flexible, extensible architecture for the provision of real-time process data to a state-of-the-art user interface, using MSHTML as the underlying rendering engine. The architecture of the interface provides a user interface that is designed to harness key industry standard technologies in an open, adaptable, architecture that facilitates the technological convergence of disparate HMI products. The preferred embodiments offer open display page architecture via the separation of the provision of data and server specific user interactions from the implementation of individual page elements. The only real assumption made about a page element is that it is part of the HTML display page and accessible via the Document Object Model.