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Feb
03
2012
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Posted 105 days ago ago by Douglas C.
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Before the debute of today's content management systems, many profitable web design businesses relied on managing static HTML sites for a substantive percentage of their profit. On the other hand, with the emergence of content management systems such as DotNetNuke, the end user has rather quickly become savvy of the positive aspects offered by dynamic web sites. The skinning architecture in DotNetNuke allows professional web designers to create stunning user interfaces which integrate seamlessly with the underlying portal application to deliver a impressive, yet visually appealing customer web site.
One of the great things about classic ASP - and one of the key explanations for its reputation as a rapid web development (RAD) tool - is the fact that ASP scripts can be injected into regular HTML markup to turn otherwise static HTML content into intelligent web pages. This feature makes it feasible to rapidly write ASP applications that construct web pages dynamically from a database and to generate powerful web applications.
Skinning entails the use of "templates" which distinguish presentation and layout attributes from application logic. An intelligent skinning engine is then used to construct the artifacts into a final product. This two-tiered approach affords both developers and designers a good level of independence when it comes to maintaining a web site, and can significantly reduce the time and effort needed in the post-release phases of a development project.
However, skinning also presents some complexities to your web application. The process of merging multiple files into a single page can cause severe performance degradation. Not to mention, developers must be properly educated to keep the presentation details of layout and appearance abstracted from their script code. Both of these items can be mitigated through the use of technology and a robust skinning architecture.
Because of this the skinning solution needs a procedure for a web designer to define a skin using the most obvious base technology. HTML is the lowest common denominator when it comes to the Web and has the greatest support in terms of design tools.
Based on the demands and challenges described above, it would seem useful to enable web designers to include placeholders into their HTML markup which represent dynamic functionality. This can provide the cleanest abstraction of “form” and “function”. The skin file could be altered without affecting the application logic. The application logic could be re-factored without impacting the user interface. The only concern is the performance penalty imposed by this additional layer of separation.