Separation of content and presentation (or separation of content and style) is the

separation of concerns In computer science, separation of concerns (sometimes abbreviated as SoC) is a design principle for separating a computer program into distinct sections. Each section addresses a separate '' concern'', a set of information that affects the code o ...

design principle as applied to the authoring and

presentation A presentation conveys information from a speaker to an audience. Presentations are typically demonstrations, introduction, lecture, or speech meant to inform, persuade, inspire, motivate, build goodwill, or present a new idea/product. Presenta ...

of content. Under this principle, visual and design aspects (presentation and style) are separated from the core material and structure (content) of a document. A typical analogy used to explain this principle is the distinction between the human skeleton (as the structural component) and human flesh (as the visual component) which makes up the body's appearance. Common applications of this principle are seen in

Web design Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; user interface design (UI design); authoring, including standardised code a ...

(

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

vs. CSS) and document typesetting (

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latices are found in nature, but synthetic latices are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a wikt:milky, milky fluid, which is present in 10% of all floweri ...

body vs. its preamble).

Use in Web design

This principle is not a rigid guideline, but serves more as

best practice A best practice is a method or technique that has been generally accepted as superior to alternatives because it tends to produce superior results. Best practices are used to achieve quality as an alternative to mandatory standards. Best practice ...

for keeping appearance and structure separate. In many cases, the

design A design is the concept or proposal for an object, process, or system. The word ''design'' refers to something that is or has been intentionally created by a thinking agent, and is sometimes used to refer to the inherent nature of something ...

and

development Development or developing may refer to: Arts *Development (music), the process by which thematic material is reshaped * Photographic development *Filmmaking, development phase, including finance and budgeting * Development hell, when a proje ...

aspects of a project are performed by different people, so keeping both aspects separated ensures both initial production accountability and later maintenance simplification, as in the ''

don't repeat yourself "Don't repeat yourself" (DRY) is a principle of software development aimed at reducing repetition of information which is likely to change, replacing it with abstractions that are less likely to change, or using data normalization which avoids r ...

'' (DRY) principle.

Use in document typesetting

is a document markup language that focuses primarily on the content and structure of a document. When a document is prepared using the LaTeX system, the source code of the document can be divided into two parts: the document body and the preamble (and the style sheets). The document body can be likened to the body of a HTML document, where one specifies the content and the structure of the document, whereas the preamble (and the style sheets) can be likened to the CSS portion of a HTML document, where the formatting, document specifications and other visual attributes are specified. Under this methodology, academic writings and publications can be structured, styled and typeset with minimal effort by its creators. In fact, it also prevents the end-users — who are usually not trained as designers themselves — from alternating between tweaking the formatting and working on the document itself. Similar to the case with HTML and CSS, the separation between content and style also allows a document to be quickly reformatted for different purposes, or a style to be re-purposed across multiple documents as well.

References

{{Reflist Design Web design

Use in Web design

Use in document typesetting

See also

References