A Software Development Metaphor for Developing Semi-dynamic Web Sites through Declarative Specifications

The idea

Hand-authored sites drift in structure and presentation, duplicate their content, and funnel every change through one person. A database-driven site fixes that, but brings a front-end to render the data, a back-end for stakeholders to edit it, access permissions to administer, and an authentication story — for many sites, complexity that joins the problem rather than the solution. The proposal is a third option: declare the site's elements, and manage them with the tools software development already has.

Contributions

• A methodology for middle-sized semi-dynamic websites, built on the distributed software development model, in which content is declaratively specified rather than authored or queried.
• A technological basis of well-known, open technologies — XML for the data hierarchy, XSD for validation, XSLT for transformation, a version control system for concurrent authoring — chosen over the custom notations and proprietary models of comparable frameworks, and open source tools chosen to satisfy an explicit openness requirement.
• A prototype framework implementing the methodology, with an account of how it was received in use.

The paper positions itself against the research frameworks of the period — Araneus, AutoWeb, Strudel and their query languages — whose common feature is a bespoke language or model; and against offline programmatic generation, from which it differs by being declarative rather than imperative.