Content Management for Declarative Web Site Design

Web site design and construction is characterised by the use of a number of poorly integrated technologies -- mark-up languages, databases, server side middleware, client side scripting languages, etc. The absence of an integrated structure means that reusability and site maintenance are difficult to achieve. Instead of this, we are building a component-based declarative web site design system, in which all aspects of a site (whole sites, pages, style sheets, layouts, data sources, scripts, HTTP objects and XHTML fragments) are described uniformly using a high level component model and the site is generated automatically from the component description. Managing content is clearly a vital part of this and this paper describes how a high level model is used to describe content