192 research outputs found
Eliminating Code Duplication in Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets (i.e., CSS) is the standard styling language, widely used for defining the presentation semantics of user interfaces for web, mobile and desktop applications. Despite its popularity, CSS has not received much attention from academia. Indeed, developing and maintaining CSS code is rather challenging, due to the inherent language design shortcomings, the interplay of CSS with other programming languages (e.g., HTML and JavaScript), the lack of empirically- evaluated coding best-practices, and immature tool support. As a result, the quality of CSS code bases is poor in many cases.
In this thesis, we focus on one of the major issues found in CSS code bases, i.e., the duplicated code. In a large, representative dataset of CSS code, we found an average of 68% duplication in style declarations. To alleviate this, we devise techniques for refactoring CSS code (i.e., grouping style declarations into new style rules), or migrating CSS code to take advantage of the code abstraction features provided by CSS preprocessor languages (i.e., superset languages for CSS that augment it by adding extra features that facilitate code maintenance). Specifically for the migration transformations, we attempt to align the resulting code with manually-developed code, by relying on the knowledge gained by conducting an empirical study on the use of CSS preprocessors, which revealed the common coding practices of the developers who use CSS preprocessor languages.
To guarantee the behavior preservation of the proposed transformations, we come up with a list of preconditions that should be met, and also describe a lightweight testing technique. By applying a large number of transformations on several web sites and web applications, it is shown that the transformations are indeed presentation-preserving, and can effectively reduce the amount of duplicated code in CSS
An Empirical Study of CSS Code Smells in Web Frameworks
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has become essential to front-end web development for the specification of style. But despite its simple syntax and the theoretical advantages attained through the separation of style from content and behavior, CSS authoring today is regarded as a complex task. As a result, developers are increasingly turning to CSS preprocessor languages and web frameworks to aid in development. However, previous studies show that even highly popular websites which are known to be developed with web frameworks contain CSS code smells such as duplicated rules and hard-coded values. Such code smells have the potential to cause adverse effects on websites and complicate maintenance. It is therefore important to investigate whether web frameworks may be encouraging the introduction of CSS code smells into websites.
In this thesis, we investigate the prevalence of CSS code smells in websites built with different web frameworks and attempt to recognize a pattern of CSS behavior in these frameworks. We collect a dataset of several hundred websites produced by each of 19 different frameworks, collect code smells and other metrics present in the CSS code of each website, train a classifier to predict which framework the website was built with, and perform various clustering tasks to gain insight into the correlations between code smells. Our results show that CSS code smells are highly prevalent in websites built with web frameworks, we achieve an accuracy of 39% in correctly classifying the frameworks based on CSS code smells and metrics, and we find interesting correlations between code smells
Type-Directed Program Transformations for the Working Functional Programmer
We present preliminary research on Deuce+, a set of tools integrating plain text editing with structural manipulation that brings the power of expressive and extensible type-directed program transformations to everyday, working programmers without a background in computer science or mathematical theory. Deuce+ comprises three components: (i) a novel set of type-directed program transformations, (ii) support for syntax constraints for specifying "code style sheets" as a means of flexibly ensuring the consistency of both the concrete and abstract syntax of the output of program transformations, and (iii) a domain-specific language for specifying program transformations that can operate at a high level on the abstract (and/or concrete) syntax tree of a program and interface with syntax constraints to expose end-user options and alleviate tedious and potentially mutually inconsistent style choices. Currently, Deuce+ is in the design phase of development, and discovering the right usability choices for the system is of the highest priority
Detecting Redundant CSS Rules in HTML5 Applications: A Tree-Rewriting Approach
HTML5 applications normally have a large set of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
rules for data display. Each CSS rule consists of a node selector (given in an
XPath-like query language) and a declaration block (assigning values to
selected nodes' display attributes). As web applications evolve, maintaining
CSS files can easily become problematic. Some CSS rules will be replaced by new
ones, but these obsolete (hence redundant) CSS rules often remain in the
applications. Not only does this "bloat" the applications, but it also
significantly increases web browsers' processing time. Most works on detecting
redundant CSS rules in HTML5 applications do not consider the dynamic behaviors
of HTML5 (specified in JavaScript); in fact, the only proposed method that
takes these into account is dynamic analysis (a.k.a. testing), which cannot
soundly prove redundancy of CSS rules. In this paper, we introduce an
abstraction of HTML5 applications based on monotonic tree-rewriting and study
its "redundancy problem". We establish the precise complexity of the problem
and various subproblems of practical importance (ranging from P to EXP). In
particular, our algorithm relies on an efficient reduction to an analysis of
symbolic pushdown systems (for which highly optimised solvers are available),
which yields a fast method for checking redundancy in practice. We implemented
our algorithm and demonstrated its efficacy in detecting redundant CSS rules in
HTML5 applications.Comment: 50 page
MediaWiki Grammar Recovery
The paper describes in detail the recovery effort of one of the official
MediaWiki grammars. Over two hundred grammar transformation steps are reported
and annotated, leading to delivery of a level 2 grammar, semi-automatically
extracted from a community created semi-formal text using at least five
different syntactic notations, several non-enforced naming conventions,
multiple misspellings, obsolete parsing technology idiosyncrasies and other
problems commonly encountered in grammars that were not engineered properly.
Having a quality grammar will allow to test and validate it further, without
alienating the community with a separately developed grammar.Comment: 47 page
CSS Minification via Constraint Solving
Minification is a widely-accepted technique which aims at reducing the size
of the code transmitted over the web. We study the problem of minifying
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) --- the de facto language for styling web
documents. Traditionally, CSS minifiers focus on simple syntactic
transformations (e.g. shortening colour names). In this paper, we propose a new
minification method based on merging similar rules in a CSS file.
We consider safe transformations of CSS files, which preserve the semantics
of the CSS file. The semantics of CSS files are sensitive to the ordering of
rules in the file. To automatically identify a rule merging opportunity that
best minimises file size, we reduce the rule-merging problem to a problem on
CSS-graphs, i.e., node-weighted bipartite graphs with a dependency ordering on
the edges, where weights capture the number of characters (e.g. in a selector
or in a property declaration). Roughly speaking, the corresponding CSS-graph
problem concerns minimising the total weight of a sequence of bicliques
(complete bipartite subgraphs) that covers the CSS-graph and respects the edge
order.
We provide the first full formalisation of CSS3 selectors and reduce
dependency detection to satisfiability of quantifier-free integer linear
arithmetic, for which highly-optimised SMT-solvers are available. To solve the
above NP-hard graph optimisation problem, we show how Max-SAT solvers can be
effectively employed. We have implemented our algorithms using Max-SAT and
SMT-solvers as backends, and tested against approximately 70 real-world
examples (including the top 20 most popular websites). In our benchmarks, our
tool yields larger savings than six well-known minifiers (which do not perform
rule-merging, but support many other optimisations). Our experiments also
suggest that better savings can be achieved in combination with one of these
six minifiers
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