This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. (August 2008)

A Web template system describes the software and methodologies used to produce web pages and for deployment on websites and delivery over the internet. Such systems process web templates, using a template engine. It is a web publishing tool present in content management systems, software frameworks, HTML editors, and many other contexts.

The basic process: content (from a database), and "presentation specifications" (in a web template), are combined (through the template engine) to mass-produce web documents.

Overview

A web template system is comprised of:

• A Template engine: the primary processing element of the system;
• Content resource: any of various kinds of input data streams, such as from a relational database, XML files, LDAP directory, and other kinds of local or networked data;
• Template resource: web templates specified according to a Template language;

The template and content resources are processed and combined by the template engine to mass-produce web documents. For purposes of this article, web documents include any of various output formats for transmission over the web via HTTP, or another internet protocol.

Motivations and typical uses

Mass-production

Various agencies and organizations use web template systems for mass-production of content when slower production alternatives prove unfeasible.

For an introductory overview, a news website is used as example. Suppose a "static website", where all web pages are static, and built by a web designer, that need to add and update pages every day.
A typical strategy to automate the web-designer's "repetitive work" is:

1. choose a web template system to maintain the website;
2. group news items with different presentation needs;
3. specify the "presentation standards" through web templates, for each group of news;
4. specify a content resource to generate or update the content of each news item.

Style standardization

Separation of concerns

Main article: Separation of concerns

For the web designer, when each web page comes from a web template, he/she can think about a modular web page structured with components that can be modified independently of each other. These components may include a header, footer, global navigation bar, local navigation bar, and content well.

For programmers the template language offer a more restricted logic, only for presentation adaptations and decisions and not for doing complex (business model) algorithms.

For other members of the "site team", a template system frees webmasters to focus on technical maintenance, content suppliers to focus on content, and for all of them more reliability.

Moreover, it has the following advantages to its use:

• Ease of design change: presentation variations on templates are "content invariant", web designer can update presentation without another preoccupations.
• Ease of interface localization: menus and other presentation standards are ease to uniformize, for users browsing on the site.
• Possibility to work separately on design and code by different people at one and the same time.

Formal characterization

The remainder of this article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (January 2007)

Please help improve this section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (May 2008)

See the on Formal treatment supplement. Here a resume.

Elements (C,T,P,R) on the dataflow representation.

Kinds of template systems

There are many public software and commercial packages promoted as being web templates and template engines, but there are a high diversity of disperse kinds of solutions. To select and group them in a systematic way, the first step is to characterize them as template systems.

A second step is to group and identify main properties of each characterized system:

• The architecture of these systems, into a client-server reference model, is the main division criteria for group then -- although the use of diverse modern web cache strategies, architectures can be characterized. There are, as illustrated, three groups: Outside server systems, Server-side systems, and Distributed systems.
• Main attributes:
  • Template languages may be:
    • Embedded or Event-driven.
    • Simple, Iterable, Programmable, or Complex.
    • Specification possession: the standards of the language are controlled by a public or not-public. The possession strategy and the ownership indicate the stability and credibility of the specification. Note that in most jurisdictions language specification cannot be copyrighted, so the possession is not absolute.
  • Template engine possession: it is public or not (ownership rights), indicating if source codes of the template engine are open, or not.

Outside server systems

Outside server template system architecture.

Web templates in this context produce only static web pages, and can be viewed as a ready-made web design, used to mass-produce "cookie-cutter" websites for rapid deployment.

HTML editors are the typical systems using outside server subsystems. They also commonly include themes in place of CSS styles. In general the template language is to be used only with the editor's software.

FrontPage and Dreamweaver are the most popular editors with template sub-system. On Dreamweaver the template tool may also include a graphical template making it easy to edit or customise graphics and images. A Flash web template uses Macromedia Flash to create visually appealing sites.

Many server-side template systems have the option to publish the output pages on the server, where the published pages will be static. It is a common feature on content management systems, like Vignette. But this does not have to be considered an out-server generation.

In the majority of the cases, this "publish option" not interferes with the template system, and it can be made by external software, as Wget.

Server-side systems

Server-side template system.

Server-side dynamic pages began generated by templates with pre-existent software adaptated for this task. This early software was the preprocessors and macro languages, adapted for the web use, running on CGI. Next, a simple but relevant technology was the direct execution made on extension modules, started with SSI.

A lot of template systems are typically used as server-side template systems:

Technically, the methodology of embedding programming languages within HTML (or XML, etc.), used in many "server-side included script languages" are also templates. All of them are embedded complex languages.

There are also preprocessors used as server-side template engines. Examples:

Distributed systems

Distributed (decentralized) template system.

The more simple form are transclusions (HTML frames). In other cases it need Dynamic web pages to run.

Examples:

• Ajax (programming)
• Rich Internet application.

See also

• Template (disambiguation)
• Template system
• Web template
• Web template engine
• XSLT