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Separating Presentation, Content and Structure

The overall quality of the website quantifies its worth. It must not only be unique, flashy or overwhelming, it should also be functional, entertaining. It is not only there for display. Its there for a purpose and it should serve that purpose. There are three elements that make up the website –it’s the presentation, content and structure. They are intertwined with each other to create an awesome website.

The very reason why separation of presentation is necessary is to simplify any alteration from a minor design adjustment to a full-fledged redesign. In order to achieve this, isolation of presentation from the rest should be completed. Isolation should involve everything purposely and exclusively geared towards style. This is not limited to CSS or a site like CSS Zen Garden. It also includes HTML tags and properties that subsist only to offer a handle for the designer to apply styles to.

Content is text which includes accompanying semantic coding. It should not require any additional presentation tags or styles in order to convey the message clearly. In isolated cases, additional tags are necessary to present the content correctly. The reason for the separation of content from the rest of the page is to make adding and updating things easy while still preserving the presentational consistency of the site.

Structure, on the other

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hand, is what makes up a page minus the presentational elements and content. In theory, you can separate content and structure. However, to be a functional site it is advisable not to. Structure should not be separated from presentation. Presentation depends on structure, however, presentation should be separated. While main presentational changes may require change in structure, content can be change even without any need for structural change.

The perfect website separation system stores content in a database to tolerate the isolation and management of content information. Structure and presentation can be handled together – presentation with the stylesheet and accompanying structural elements when needed. Structure, on the other hand, is best dealt with through a system of template package built using a server-side scripting language like PHP or ASP. Each template can have one or more stylesheets but every template package can connect to the same with matching database to recover content for display. Lots of content management systems provide varying levels of this kind of support. Nonetheless, full-featured templates systems that make CSS Zen Garden-like usage of stylesheets are few and better.


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