Site-wide templates for Internet sites

Abstract

This paper presents the design and implementation of a system to maintain multiple site-wide templates for one website. The idea is to separate the core contents of a web page from the graphical elements making up the page header and footer. Our goal is to non-intrusively allow both programmers and graphics designers to work mostly independently, decreasing development time while increasing the reliability and easing maintenance of the templates. SWTM accomplishes most of these goals through a simple programmer's API, an object-based approach to building templates, and a stored repository of all objects previously created. Thus, even when the separation of tasks between programmer and graphics designer is not possible, the programmer need only solve each problem once, allowing the graphics designer to reuse initial work in future templates.