Addressing web locator fragility
Iñigo Aldalur, Óscar Díaz · 2017
Web locators uniquely identify elements on the Web Content. They are heavily used in different scenarios, from Web harvesting to Web testing and browser extensions. Locators' Achilles heel is their fragility upon Website upgrades. This work tackles locator fragility in the context of browser extensions. We introduce regenerative locator, i.e. traditional structure-based locators which are supplemented with contingency data from the target node. The aim: keeping browser extensions up and running for as long as possible. Eight case studies are analysed by considering real Website upgrades taken from Wayback Machine. Figures indicate a 70% success in regenerating broken locators without interrupting extension functioning.