RE-PRESENT: Automatic Repair of Presentation Failures in Web Applications

呈现失败是指网页在视觉外观上的缺陷。它们的范围从页面布局的缺陷，如重叠的内容和页面边缘呈现的文本，到可用性问题，如不可读的文本和无法访问的导航。一个组织的网站通常是推动其业务和建立有关其自身信息的主要手段之一。因此，演讲失败会破坏一个组织的信息、信誉，甚至潜在的收入。修复显示错误对于web开发人员来说是很困难的。网站需要在从手机到台式机的各种设备上正确显示，这意味着开发人员需要确保网页在各种屏幕尺寸上都能正确显示，并为内容和图形元素提供不同的可用空间。不管用户使用的是哪种浏览器，也不管它被翻译成什么语言，网站都需要正确的格式。此外，它们必须能够被残疾用户访问。表示代码（使用HTML、CSS和JavaScript的组合开发）的复杂性意味着，在手动修复表示失败时，考虑到这些不同的方面是一项挑战。人工“修理”甚至可能在不经意间导致进一步的缺陷。因此，自动修复技术将极大地帮助开发人员完成这项任务。RE-PRESENT是一项海外旅行补助金提案，旨在使PI能够继续和发展国际合作以解决这些问题。它打算开发基于搜索的技术，自动生成用于管理网页布局和设计的HTML、CSS和JavaScript代码的修复。基于搜索的技术将代码的当前版本视为搜索空间中的一个点，并使用特定于问题的适应度函数将搜索方法引导到构成页面修复或“固定”版本的空间中的另一个点。RE-PRESENT将进行以下创新：-它将为目前无法自动修复的演示失败开发自动修复技术，包括那些与“响应式设计”（旨在调整不同屏幕尺寸的网页布局），可访问性问题以及与负责处理用户交互的错误JavaScript代码相关的缺陷。-它将开发能够一次性解决不同类型的演示失败的技术，而不是孤立地解决。这一点很重要，因为修复一个表示错误（例如，减少按钮的大小，使其不再与页面上的其他内容重叠）可能会无意中导致其他错误（例如，可访问性问题，因为按钮现在太小了，视力受损的用户无法看到）。它将研究能够快速产生结果的技术，以便开发人员在实践中使用。基于搜索的方法是有效的，但通常很慢，因为修复需要通过在浏览器中呈现应用修复的页面来评估。RE-PRESENT将研究网页布局建模的方法，以避免需要比严格需要的更多、冗长、适合度计算。

Presentation failures are defects in the visual appearance of a web page. They range from flaws in the page's layout such as overlapping content, and text rendered off the edge of the page, to usability problems such as unreadable text and inaccessible navigation. An organisation's website is often one of its primary means of driving its business and establishing information about itself. As such, presentation failures undermine an organisation's message, its credibility, and potentially its revenue.Repairing presentation failures is difficult for web developers. Websites need to display correctly on a wide range of devices from mobile phones to desktops, meaning that developers need to ensure web pages lay out correctly on a vast range of screen sizes, with varying amounts of space available to lay out content and graphical elements. Websites need to format correctly regardless of the browser that a user is using, or what language it has been translated to. Furthermore, they must be accessible to disabled users.The complexity of presentational code (developed using a combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) means that accounting for each of these different aspects when repairing a presentation failure manually is challenging. Manual "repairs" can even inadvertently lead to further defects. Automated repair techniques would therefore greatly assist developers in this task.RE-PRESENT is a proposal for an overseas travel grant intended to allow the PI to continue and develop international collaborations to solve these problems. It intends to develop search-based techniques to automatically generate repairs to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code used to manage the layout and design of web pages. Search-based techniques treat the current version of the code as a point in a search space, and use a problem-specific fitness function to guide a search method to another point in the space that constitutes a repaired, or "fixed" version of the page.RE-PRESENT will make the following innovations:- It will develop automated repair techniques for presentation failures currently unrepairable automatically, including those related to "responsive designs" (web page layouts that are intended to adjust to different screen sizes), accessibility issues, and defects related to faulty JavaScript code responsible for handling user interaction.- It will develop techniques that are capable of accounting for different types of presentation failure at once, rather than in isolation. This is important, because the act of fixing one presentation failure (e.g., reducing the size of a button, so that it no longer overlaps other content on a page) may inadvertently cause others (e.g., an accessibility issue, because the button is now too small for visually impaired users to see).- It will investigate techniques that produce results fast enough for developers to use in practice. Search-based approaches are effective, but often slow because repairs need to be evaluated by rendering the page with the fix applied in a browser. RE-PRESENT will investigate ways of modelling web page layout to avoid the need for more, lengthy, fitness calculations than are strictly needed.