Separation of Concerns in Web User Interface Design

Separation of Concerns in Web User Interface Design

Holwerda, J.J.

Van Deursen, A. (mentor)
Visser, E. (mentor)

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

2008-09-26

Web User interfaces must be able to handle the output of the web application itself and the input from its users. For this reason, user interfaces have to cope with the complexity of both the application and the users. Furthermore, user interface design is an expensive, complex, and time consuming process. Specifying the appearance of web applications is too low-level due to a lack of good abstractions. This results in undesired style diversity throughout the web application and a lot of style duplication, making the web application dif?cult to maintain and decreasing reusability. This thesis shows an approach to overcome these problems by separating the various user interface concerns and addressing them separately. This is done by developing language extensions for the speci?cation of layout and style and by separating presentation from document structure. The language extensions aim to achieve separation of concerns while still having an integrated language with static veri?cation. Furthermore, web applications are commonly styled using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS suffers from a number of shortcomings such as missing and excessive functionality and poor design. The language extensions as developed in this thesis overcome these problems.

web user interface
dsl
separation of concerns

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:861b2cc7-8ca3-4bed-8d51-f94a359824fc

TU Delft, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Sci, Computer Science

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2008 J.J. Holwerda