Cascading Style Sheets: A Novel Approach Towards Productive Styling with Today's Standards

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Abstract

In this paper we present an approach of generating Cascading Style Sheet documents automatically if the desired effect on the content elements is specified. While a Web user agent resolves the CSS rules and computes their effect, our approach handles the way back. We argue, that this can remarkably improve CSS productivity, since the process of CSS authoring always involves this direction implicitly. Our approach claims a new and innovative way to reuse chunks of markup together with its presentation. It furthermore bears potential for the optimization and reorganization of CSS documents. We describe criteria for CSS code quality we oriented on, including a quantitative indicator for the abstractness of a CSS presentation specification. An evaluation and recomputation of the CSS for 25.000 HTML documents shows that concerning these criteria the automatically generated code comes close to manually authored code.