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Developing Structured WWW-Sites with W3DT
Martin Bichler, Stefan Nusser
Martin.Bichler@wu-wien.ac.at,
Stefan.Nusser@wu-wien.ac.at
Vienna University of Business Administration and Economics
Department for Management Information Systems
Augasse 2-6
1090 Wien
Austria
Abstract: In this paper we introduce W3DT (World Wide Web Design Technique), a semiformal
design technique which is capable of modeling the dichotomy of structured and unstructured
information represented in large Web-sites. Hence, it is suitable for modeling the
WWW-frontend of a database system as well as for designing the hypertext description of a
company. The proposed graphical notation provides an easily comprehensible framework for
the development and rapid prototyping of a WWW-based information system. The design
process is further facilitated by the W3DT Web-Designer, a prototypical application, which
supports the graphical notation of the methodology and is capable of generating a framework
of HTML-pages and CGI-Scripts at every step of the design process.
Introduction and Motivation
For a lot of organisations the WWW provides a new and powerful opportunity to interact with customers. The
scope of these sites covers the presentation of products, the company's business performance as well as the
announcement of job offers. The extent has grown due to the numerous tasks they fulfill. A few hundred pages
and various gateway scripts to inhouse information systems have to be planned and implemented. At the moment
we lack guidelines and tools for a structured design process of such hypermedia applications and therefore
the ever growing network of interlinked applications is becoming increasingly confused and hard to
maintain [see Bieber et al. 1995].
In conventional software engineering, design and development methodologies have been established to cope
with complex tasks. Some of these experiences can also be adopted for the development of Web-sites. But Web
projects differ from traditional software development projects in several critical dimensions. They involve
people with very different skill sets: authors, content designers, artists as well as programmers. The design of
hypermedia applications involves capturing and organizing the structure of a complex domain and making it
clear and accessible to users. After all, the multimedia aspects of Web-sites raise numerous difficulties. Therefore,
[Isakowitz et al. 1995] emphasize that hypermedia design is a challenging process that is currently more
of an art than a science. Nevertheless, a solid development cycle and formal design techniques can help developers
substantially. They lead to better Web-sites, which means better to read, to navigate and to maintain.
W3DT (World Wide Web Design Technique) was invented especially for the development of large Web-sites.
The W3DT methodology is capable of modeling highly structured, database-like information-domains on the
one hand and conventional hypertext on the other and thus represents the dichotomy of structured as well as
unstructured information. A prototypical tool called Web-Designer supports the graphical notation of the
methodology and is capable of generating a framework of HTML-pages and CGI-Scripts at every step of the
design process.
This paper is structured as follows: In the next section, the current approaches to hypermedia design are described
and the need for new concepts is explained. We refine these needs in the following section and briefly
show the basic W3DT design primitives and their use. The main section gives an example application which is
modelled and generated step-by-step using the W3DT Web-Designer.