MRWeb: An Exploration of Generating Multi-Page Resource-Aware Web Code from UI Designs
This addresses a gap in web development tools for designers and developers by enabling multi-page, resource-aware code generation, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods with a new dataset and framework.
The paper tackled the problem of generating multi-page websites from UI designs, which existing methods limited to single pages, and introduced the MRWeb task with a resource list data structure, showing that it boosted navigation functionality from 0% to 66%-80%.
Multi-page websites dominate modern web development. However, existing design-to-code methods rely on simplified assumptions, limiting to single-page, self-contained webpages without external resource connection. To address this gap, we introduce the Multi-Page Resource-Aware Webpage (MRWeb) generation task, which transforms UI designs into multi-page, functional web UIs with internal/external navigation, image loading, and backend routing. We propose a novel resource list data structure to track resources, links, and design components. Our study applies existing methods to the MRWeb problem using a newly curated dataset of 500 websites (300 synthetic, 200 real-world). Specifically, we identify the best metric to evaluate the similarity of the web UI, assess the impact of the resource list on MRWeb generation, analyze MLLM limitations, and evaluate the effectiveness of the MRWeb tool in real-world workflows. The results show that resource lists boost navigation functionality from 0% to 66%-80% while facilitating visual similarity. Our proposed metrics and evaluation framework provide new insights into MLLM performance on MRWeb tasks. We release the MRWeb tool, dataset, and evaluation framework to promote further research.