Separating Presentation, Content and Structure

The overall quality of the website quantifies its worth. Itmust not only be unique, flashy or overwhelming, it should also befunctional, entertaining. It is not only there for display. Its therefor a purpose and it should serve that purpose. There are threeelements that make up the website -it's the presentation, content andstructure. They are intertwined with each other to create an awesomewebsite.

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

Content is text which includesaccompanying semantic coding. It should not require any additionalpresentation tags or styles in order to convey the message clearly. Inisolated cases, additional tags are necessary to present the contentcorrectly. The reason for the separation of content from the rest ofthe page is to make adding and updating things easy while stillpreserving the presentational consistency of the site.

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

Theperfect website separation system stores content in a database totolerate the isolation and management of content information. Structureand presentation can be handled together - presentation with thestylesheet and accompanying structural elements when needed. Structure,on the other hand, is best dealt with through a system of templatepackage built using a server-side scripting language like PHP or ASP.Each template can have one or more stylesheets but every templatepackage can connect to the same with matching database to recovercontent for display. Lots of content management systems provide varyinglevels of this kind of support. Nonetheless, full-featured templatessystems that make CSS Zen Garden-like usage of stylesheets are few andbetter.

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