One of the fundamental aspects of the next generation of the web, or web 2.0 to use the popular term, is to provide separate content and presentation so that content can be reused in multiple forms.  An example of this is for a listing of news reports to be viewable in a web page with headlines, but this same listing of news reports is also available as an RSS feed.  The same content is behind both of these presentations of a news report, but a different presentation techniques were employed.  However, the basic nature of the web?s primary medium, HTML does not lend itself to content-presentation separation as much as one would desire.  While CSS has done a great towards this end, the vast majority of web pages out there still employ presentation mixed in with content in HTML.  For much of the features of a typical webpage it would be unrealistic not to do so.  For example, most web pages use some type of navigation menu.  This is not conceptually part of the content of a given page, rather it higher level view of the content of a multiple pages, but it?s placement in the HTML in no way matches its conceptual meaning.  Generally it would not be possible to do the average navigation entirely in CSS, they usually employ HTML, CSS, and often JavaScript, and to treat a navigation bar entirely as presentation is often wrong as it generally does represent content, just not in the same conceptually at the same level as other content on the page.

The most important step towards the separation of presentation and content is to actually develop data structures that represent content effectively. Content can then be transformed into the appropriate presentation as needed. As long as the content is stored in an actual data structure that can be reused for any presentation and transformed as needed.  However, most content is stored in HTML pages, is not properly abstracted from the presentation and therefore it is very difficult to get to the content.

Authenteo provides real data structures to structure content. Content is organized into a list of pages, and each page has a title field, a name field, a body field, etc.  This data can then be transformed into a variety of presentations. 

The term mashup is a recently popularized term that basically refers to the practice of taking content from different sources and displaying the data with a particular presentation. The most important ingredient for Mashups is to have content that is structured and be easily brought together with other content sources and displayed in a new presentation.  Authenteo provides a very simple straightforward structure for content along with a very easy to use presentation builder that makes mashups incredibly easy to build.

XSL is one way to transform content.  However XSL is base upon content being XML format.  This provides a major drawback, as XML is very limited in its ability to describe data structures.  Presentations that work by transforming real data structures are much more powerful in rendering content.