Automatic Identification of Presentation Failures in Responsive Web Pages
Thomas A. Walsh · White Rose eTheses Online (University of Leeds, The University of Sheffield, University of York) · 2018
With the increasing number and variety of devices being used to access the World Wide Web, providing a good browsing experience to all users, regardless of device, is a critical task. To do this, many web developers now use responsive web design (RWD) to build web pages that provide a bespoke layout tailored to the specific characteristics of the device in use, normally the viewport width. However, implementing responsive web pages is an error-prone task, as web page elements can behave in unpredictable ways as the viewport expands and contracts. This leads to presentation failures — errors in the visual appearance of the web page. As well-designed responsive web pages can have an array of benefits, identifying presentation failures quickly and accurately is an important task. Unfortunately, current approaches to detecting presentation failures in web pages are insufficient. The huge number of different viewport widths that require support makes thorough checking of the layout on all devices infeasible. Furthermore, the current range of developer tools only provide limited support for testing responsive web pages. This thesis tackles these problems by making the following contributions. First, it proposes the responsive layout graph (RLG), a model of the dynamic layout of modern responsive web pages. Then, it explores how the RLG can be used to automatically detect potentially unseen side-effects of small changes to the source code of a web page. Next, it investigates the detection of several common types of layout failures, leveraging implicit oracle information in place of an explicit oracle. Experiments showed both the approach for detecting potentially unseen side-effects and the approach for identifying common types of layout failure to be highly effective. The manual effort required by the user is further reduced by an approach that automatically grouped related failures together. Finally, a case study of 33 real-world responsive layout failures investigates how difficult such failures are to fix. These approaches have all been implemented into a software tool, ReDeCheck, which helps web developers create better responsive web pages.