Layout, Content and Logic Separation in Web Engineering

The rapid development of flexible, layout independent web sites is an increasingly important problem. Flexibility, scalability and the ability to adapt to evolving layout requirements is a key success factor for many web sites. A fundamental way to meet these requirements is to strictly separate business logic from the layout and the content. The World Wide Web Consortium's XML and XSL standards aim at providing the separation between layout and content only. In this paper, we describe our ongoing work in separating the layout, the content and the logic of web sites and show how this separation is supported by the tool MyXML. The underlying concepts of our solution are a declarative description of the layout information, automatic generation of static and dynamic pages and support of interconnection to extended information sources such as databases.