Webdesign and Supercompilation

With supercompilation being a long-forgotten technique invented decades ago, and with “webdesign” term being usurped by graphic artists & HCI experts, I doubt this post will be anything close to popular, but as always, it will not stop me from expressing my opinion. But let’s take it slowly now.

Let us assume the “web design” in a good, broad sense now: not just the omnipresent “logo on the right vs logo on the left” & “10 tips to get more clicks”. Just as software design comprises multiple heterogeneous activities concerning the making of a piece of software, just as language design is about how to create a good language suited for the target domain, web design is in general about how to make a web site, a web service or a web app well.

Super-compilation is a program transformation method of aggressive optimisation: it refactors the code based on the most possible assumptions, throwing away all dead code, unused options and inactivated functionalities. If was irrelevant or at least unproductive during the structured programming epoch, but the results of super-compilation were promising before that and remain promising in our time, during the epoch of multi-purpose factory factory frameworks.

The current (at least since 1999) trend in web design is dynamics and more dynamics. The content and its presentation is separated, and most of the time what the end-user sees is what is being generated from the actual content stored somewhere in a database by using the representation rules expressed in anything from XSL to AJAX (in software we would call such process “pretty-printing”). However, this is necessary only for truly dynamic applications such as Google Wave. In most of the other rich internet applications the content is being accessed (pretty-printed) much more often than being changed. When the super-compilation philosophy is applied here, we quickly see that it is possible to store the pre-generated data ready for immediate end-user demonstration. If the dependencies are known, one can easily design an infrastructure that would respond to any change of data with re-generation of all the visible data that depend on it. And that is the way it can and should be — I’m running several websites, ranging from my personal page to a popular contest syndication facility, all completed with this approach: the end-user always sees the statically generated solid XHTML, which is being updated on the server whenever the need arises, be it once a minute or once a month. Being static is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if you provide the end-user with all the expected buttons and links. Saves time and computational effort on all the on-the-fly processing requests.

When will it not work: for web apps that are essentially front-ends for a volatile database access; for web apps that are truly dynamic in nature; for web apps where user preferences are inexpressible in CSS & access rights. When will it work: pretty much everywhere else. Think about it. Have fun.