The Internet is an international digital data network that interconnects digital equipment of various users, such as commercial companies, educational institutions, government branches and individuals. The World Wide Web referred to, as “WWW” is a part of the Internet network, which communicates according to a standard hypertext transfer protocol known as http. The World Wide Web is a very popular way of presenting and/or accessing information, on a variety of topics, stored on computing machines connected to the Internet.
WWW resources are organized to allow users to move easily from one resource to another. Users generally navigate through the WWW using an application known as a WWW browser client. The browser presents formatted text, images, sound, or other objects, such as hyperlinks, in the form of a WWW page on a computer screen. The user can click on a hyperlink with the cursor to navigate to other WWW pages on the same source computer, or server, or on any other WWW server on the network. The WWW links exist across the global Internet to form a large-scale, distributed, multimedia knowledge base that relates words, phrases, images, or other information. Smaller-scale implementations may occur on enterprise Internets.
Locations for information that may be accessed via the World Wide Web are referred to as web sites. Web sites generally offer an appearance that resembles the graphical user interfaces (GUI) of Microsoft's Windows operating system, Apple's Macintosh operating system, and other graphics based operating systems. They may include scroll bars, menus, buttons, icons, and toolbars, all of which can be activated by a mouse or other input device.
To find a web site, a user can consult an Internet reference guide or directory, or use one of the many freely available search engines, such as WebCrawler and Yahoo. These engines are search and retrieval programs, of varying sophistication, that ask the user to fill out a form before executing a search of the WWW for the requested information. The user can also create a list of the URLs of frequently visited web sites. Such a list helps a user recall a URL and easily access the desired web site. Web sites are easily modified and updated, so the content of many sites changes frequently.
Typical organization of the information to be presented at a web site includes various web pages. A web page is a document designed to be accessed and read over the web. These pages are arranged in a sequence that leads to the information that the user desires to access. The initial page in a web site is a home page. It is a hypertext document that allows a user to interactively select the next page, which hopefully is one that has the information the user desires. These web pages often include graphics, which means that many data bits must be transferred, and much time or data bandwidth used for each page.
WWW pages are formatted using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Information on these pages is transferred among computers on the WWW using a set of rules known as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Other features may be added to web pages with special programs, such as Java, a programming language that is independent of a computer's operating system, developed by Sun Microsystems. Java-enabled web browsers use applets that run within the context of HTML-formatted documents. With applets it is possible to add animation and greater interactively to web pages.
The content presented on a web site usually contains hypertext and icons, pictures that also serve as links to other sites. By clicking on the hypertext or icons with their mouse, users instruct their browser program to connect to the web site specified by the URL contained in the hypertext link. These links are embedded in the web site through the use of HTML that encodes the links with the correct URL.
Every web site has a specific address on the WWW called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). These addresses end in extensions that indicate the type of organization sponsoring the web site, for example, .gov for government agencies, .edu for academic institutions, and .com for commercial enterprises. The user's computer must be connected to the Internet and have a special software program called a browser to retrieve and read information from a web site. Examples of browsers include Navigator from the Netscape Communications Corporation, Explorer from the Microsoft Corporation and Mosaic and IBM's Web Explorer.
Browsers allow a user to access computers known as “servers” located throughout the world for information, which is stored therein and provided to the user by the server by sending files, or data packs to the requesting user from the server's resources. An example of such a request might be something called GSQL (get SQL), which was a NCSA language and CGI server program developed to getting textual results for a user caller. Some browsers display a web page on a computer screen only when all the data (i.e., text and images) is received. As a result, the computer screen becomes blank for an unbearable period of time (e.g., many minutes) after a request for the web page is made. Other browsers display the text before the images are received. These browsers may use icons at appropriate places on a web page to indicate that images would appear at these places later. When the images are received, the web page needs to be reformatted because the sizes of the icons are different from the sizes of the images. The reformatting process can produce a sudden and annoying change on the computer screen.
The problem with WML/HTML applications is that the number of user agents (browsers) which end user can use is large and diverse and it is increasing all of the time. Currently, one method to tailor the code for different browsers is by testing the applications on the different browsers one by one and tweaking the code to tailor the application to work optimally on each of the browsers. In the WML arena, a given WML page may well look very different on different WAP-enabled devices. The lack of a definitive standard for browsers has resulted in several considerations that need to be considered when designing WAP sites.
During the design of a Web page, the designer wants to make sure that the Web design will work on a number of different Web browsers. As with any form of application development, one of the most important steps is testing. The current method to test the different browsers is to install all of the different browsers on the system and test the Web design on each browser one-by-one. The other solution is to use some of the pre-existing products that test Web browsers one-by-one using an editor and viewer. One such product is called “Browserola.” This product does not require a copy of the browser installed to test the Web page. This product has a database of tags representing features from different browsers. It evaluates the source code for the Web site looking for tags for the different browsers. With this product when a Web browser encounters an HTML tag or attribute that the browser does not support, it ignores the tag and continues processing the rest of the page. To emulate each browser, this product analyzes the HTML document, checks a table of supported tags and attributes for the chosen browser and eliminates the tags if they do not exist in the documented.
In addition to testing the web site on the various browsers to determine the effectiveness of each browser, it is also desirable to have a technique that can compare each browser's execution of the web site to a set of criteria established by the web designer. This technique could rank the browsers for effectiveness based on the criteria. One such technique that currently ranks various browsers' accessibility is referred to as “Bobby”. Bobby is a tool for Web page authors. It helps them identify potential problems to their pages so users with disabilities can more easily use their Web pages. For example, a blind user will be aided by adding a sound track to a movie, and a hard-of-hearing user will be aided by a written transcript of a sound file on a Web page. Bobby will recommend that these be added if they do not already exist.
Many people with disabilities will use special Web browsers, such as one which reads text out loud using a speech synthesizer for blind users. The suggestions made by Bobby will help authors to add information to a Web page which will help the special browsers work more effectively. In addition to checking for disability access, Bobby finds HTML elements and attributes that are not compatible across browsers.
There also exist another class of services called HTML Validators which are basically HTML syntax checkers which go through the HTML code and identify errors in your HTML source. Bobby also has some level of HTML validation in that it identifies HTML elements and element attributes that are not compatible across browsers. Other HTML services also exist which give you “Page statistics” which tell you how long each file in the web page take to download over different speed access lines.
A Web designer should always test more than one browser when creating a web site. The same document can look quite different from browser to browser unless the document has been evaluated on several browsers (and on multiple platforms) and edited based on these evaluations. The presentation of a web page on one browser may be quite different than the view of the page seen by the designer of the page using another browser. The general practice is to evaluate a Web design on at least two of the more popular browsers, one at a time. It is also advisable to validate documents as well as check them in a linemode browser such as Lynx.
It is desirable to have a method and system which when given a web page, can simultaneously display multiple browser outputs on one screen to give the web designer an opportunity to visually compare the web site. In addition, this same method and system should be able to compile all of this information together in a report and rank the site for usability across the various browsers displaying the web site.