Aggiorno for CSS reasoning

8. October 2008 05:35 by CarlosLoria in General  //  Tags:   //   Comments (0)

 As you might know, recently Artinsoft released Aggiorno a smart tool for fixing pages for improving page structure and enforcing compliance with web standards in a friendly and unobtrusive way. Some remarks on the tool capabilities can be seen here. Some days ago I had the opportunity to use part of the framework on which the tool is built-in. Such a framework will be available in a forthcoming version to allow users developing extensions of the tool for user specific needs. Such needs may be variety of course; in our case we are interested in analyzing style sheets (CSS) and style affecting directives in order to help to predict and explain potential differences among browsers. The idea is to include a feature of such a nature in a future version of the tool. We notice that this intended tool though similar should be quite smarter than existing and quite nice tools like Firebug with respect to CSS understanding. Our idea was to implement it using the Aggiorno components; we are still working on it but it has been so far very easy to get a rich model of a page and its styles for our purposes. Our intention is to use a special form of temporal reasoning for explaining potentially conflictive behaviors at the CSS level. Using the framework we are able to build an automaton (actually a transition system) modeling the CSS behavior (intended and actual one). We incorporate dynamic (rendered, browser dependant) information in addition to the static one provided by the styles and the page under analysis. Dynamic information is available trough Aggiorno´s framework which is naturally quite nice to have it. Just to give you a first impression of the potential we show you a simple artificial example on how we model the styling information under our logic approach here. Our initial feelings on the potential of such a framework are quite encouraging, so we hope very soon this framework become public for similar or better developments according to own needs.