MRWeb: An Exploration of Generating Multi-Page Resource-Aware Web Code from UI Designs

TL;DR

This paper introduces MRWeb, a new task for generating multi-page, resource-aware web UIs from designs, addressing limitations of existing single-page methods, and provides a dataset, metrics, and a tool for future research.

Contribution

The paper proposes the MRWeb task, a resource-aware multi-page web code generation framework, along with a new dataset, evaluation metrics, and a tool to advance design-to-code research.

Findings

Resource lists significantly improve navigation functionality.

Evaluation metrics effectively measure visual similarity and resource management.

The MRWeb tool demonstrates practical utility in real-world workflows.

Abstract

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.