We have developed several tools to test Web applications. We will update this page as these tools become mature enough to be used by testers.
In order to preserve the effectiveness
of the World Wide Web (WWW) as a communication medium, web developers must
have a keen understanding of how pages within their website are rendered
to the diversely equipped Web audience. More specifically, since
users explore the WWW with a wide variety of browser, browser version,
and platform configurations, the display of individual web pages can be
significantly different based on the actual browsing environment.
Such differences can essentially threaten the ability for pages to be displayed
and to function as the author intended resulting in documents with
missing elements, improper text alignments, and malfunctioning scripts.
Given that web page rendering
is largely based on the tags that are contained within the HTML source
code for the document and the relative support for a tag within a browsing
environment, our approach to identifying page-to-browser compliancy issues
is to scan the document source for the presence of tags known to be unsupported
within specific browser/version/platform environments. As a result
of our work, we have created a tool, the Internet Compatibility Evaluator
(ICE), that will evaluate compliancy for an entire website based on both
predefined and, when necessary, user-specified sets of rules that specify
the tags that are unsupported within specific environments. The ability
of the tool to accept user-defined rules allows it to be much more flexible
than current page-browser compliancy tools and, subsequently, more equipped
to deal with newer compliancy rules as they evolve.
The tool that we have developed
works by allowing the user to specify a website of interest and then import
a set of compliancy rules that will be used for browser compliancy evaluation.
Currently, the interface provides visual clues that indicate the hierarchy
of a given website as well as the presence of broken links. Pages
which comply with a given navigation environment are listed under a user-provided,
descriptive title in a window on the right of the web site hierarchy.
By clicking on a compliancy
rule heading of interest in the right-most window of the interface, users
can distinguish the pages that correspond with a given compliancy rule
in the hierarchical site overview by observing the subsequent highlights.
This, of course, will allow web site developers to quickly identify pages
that are incompliant with a given rule.
This project is in its very early stages, and consequently, there are quite a few issues to be resolved. Among them, exploring methods of more efficient implementation, improving the user interface, and implementing more effective mechanisms for user-defined rule specification. At the conclusion at this research endeavor, we hope to have created a tool that will help web developers to efficiently assess the compliancy issues on their website based on both tool-inherent and user-defined compliancy rules.