FW: Divorcing Presentation from Content - a prototype.

cross posted to this mailing list for wider coverage.

-----Original Message-----
From: Sunil [mailto:sunilgupta@btopenworld.com]
Sent: 26 November 2005 01:08
To: 'www-talk@w3.org'
Subject: Divorcing Presentation from Content - a prototype.


Hi, I've knocked together some javascript code that pushes the
responsibility for merging the content with
the presentation of a web page to the browser. Its only a prototype at the
moment and runs on firefox, but
as a proof of concept it shows how it could be done.

the project page is
	http://sdpml.mozdev.org/

and a working prototype can be found at
	http://www.paglis.co.uk/sdpml/index.html

I would be interested if anyone else is working on this kind of project.

The prototype shows that its possible to reduce the amount of information
that the web server application
needs to send back to the client to be just the dynamic data content. The
client then separately pulls
the back static layout templat of the page, additional static data and
merges all three back together into a
fully rendered HTML page.

This means that the amount of information that the web server application
has to send back to
the client is much much smaller as it no longer has to send any layout
information. The presentation layer
can be changed independentally from the application by changing the
templates. the browser is able to cache both the
layout templates and the static content - making fewer overall requests from
the web site over multiple sessions.

The other significant thing to note is that the templates are HTML, and can
be produced using industry standard
HTML authoring tools. No knowledge of XSLT is needed.

As indicated it is a working prototype in its early days and currently only
fully works in Firefox.
I welcome comments and improvements on the work so far. I've got a long
wishlist at the moment:

	* make it work in Internet Explorer
	* add server side support to render server side for unsupported browsers
	* add arrays of values and repeated blocks.
	* allow the browser to choose which template to use
	* allow the browser to pull in a different content file for different
locales
	* clean up the rendered HTML produced by the prototype
	* find out if anyone else at the w3c is working on this type of concept.

Thanks
s u n i l

SDPML is an open source project, licensed under the terms of the OSI
certified Open Source Artistic License
based on code Copyright 2005 Paglis Software.

Received on Monday, 28 November 2005 22:42:02 UTC