Evaluation of separated concerns in web-based delivery of user interfaces

Abstract

User Interfaces (UI) play a significant role in contemporary web applications. Responsiveness and performance are influenced by the UI design, complexity of its features, the amount of transmitted information, as well as by network conditions. While traditional web delivery approaches separate out presentation of UI in the form of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a large number of presentation concerns are left tangled together in the structural description used for data presentations. Such tangling impedes concern reuse, which impacts the description size as well as caching options. This paper evaluates separation of UI concerns from the perspective of UI delivery. Concerns are distributed to clients through various resources/channels, which impacts the UI composition at the client-side. This decreases the volume of transmitted information and extends caching options. The efficacy is demonstrated through experiments.