A system and method which utilizes an additional layer of control in a conventional Model View Controller model for web presentations. In particular, the new layer creates logical components of templates which can then be dynamically controlled by rule definitions inherent in the data structure. In this manner the resulting system can apply logic to the rendering of the template while significantly reducing the amount of logic required in the template itself or required to be defined in code. This allows templates to be developed which are easier to understand and modify as they typically contain far less non-HTML artifacts than traditional methods (e.g., Java Server Pages).