Patterns and Components: Capturing the Lasting amidst the Changing

Documents, sites and in general applications in the World-Wide Web are undergoing constant evolution. Yet we would argue that not everything changes but that a large proportion of design decisions are of lasting quality. We propose that such design decision be captured explicitly through complimentary use of design patterns in design methods, and illustrate this with the use of patterns in the Object-Oriented Hypermedia Design Method (OOHDM). Further, we propose the use of an object-oriented web implementation technology, the WebComposition Markup Language (WCML), to facilitate straightforward mapping of object-oriented design patterns to an implementation, and so to facilitate the tracking of higher-level design decisions in a web implementation.