Vykintas Bartkus — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 12:29:49 GMT

Hi Anders and all, I completely agree that this is very interesting discussion. And that’s why I’d like to share my experience. For more than 10 I develop web applications, but I am a bit confused about the prototyping using only XHTML, CSS and JS. IMHO these techniques can be useful only for BASIC prototyping which shows the functionality of just some parts of outgoing solution. But for overall prototype you need something more flexible than pure XHTML. What I am doing to solve that issue – I create main structure of the prototype in XML, then connecting it to small PH5 script that controls the behaviour of links (top, bottom, sidebar menus for example). In this way I split the layout in main general parts – footer, main area ant the left, right sidebar and footer. All these parts can contain their unique menu. All the parts are controlled by XML and they have separate HTML templates, so mainly I work ONLY on the HTMLs of these templates, but not doing whole html for particular page or part of the prototype. The picture is worth the thousand words, so I offer to take a look at my last prototype project on http://vukyntas.web5.1.hosting.efort.com.ua/. It is done by the technique described upon. See the XML file for more details – http://vukyntas.web5.1.hosting.efort.com.ua/config.xml.
I hope this will be helpful. I you have any question to not hesitate to contact me at vb@image-web.fr.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Vykintas Bartkus