Cascading Tree Sheets and recombinant HTML: Better encapsulation and retargeting of web content

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) took a valuable step towards separating web content from presentation. But HTML pages still contain large amounts of "design scaffolding" needed to hierarchically layer content for proper presentation. This paper presents Cascading Tree Sheets (CTS), a CSS-like...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Benson, Edward Oscar, Karger, David R.
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2014
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/87014
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0024-5847
Description
Summary:Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) took a valuable step towards separating web content from presentation. But HTML pages still contain large amounts of "design scaffolding" needed to hierarchically layer content for proper presentation. This paper presents Cascading Tree Sheets (CTS), a CSS-like language for separating this presentational HTML from real content. With CTS, authors can use standard CSS selectors to describe how to graft presentational scaffolding onto their pure-content HTML. This improved separation of content from presentation enables even naive authors to incorporate rich layouts (including interactive Javascript) into their own pages simply by linking to a tree sheet and adding some class names to their HTML.