WebSee: A Tool for Debugging HTML Presentation Failures

Abstract

Presentation failures in a website can negatively impact end users' perception of the quality of the website, the services it delivers, and the branding a company is trying to achieve. Presentation failures can occur easily in modern web applications because of the highly complex and dynamic nature of the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that define a web page's visual appearance. Debugging such failures manually is time consuming and error-prone, and existing techniques do not provide an automated debugging solution. In this paper, we present our tool, WebSee, that provides a fully automated debugging solution for presentation failures in web applications. When run on real-world web applications, WebSee was able to accurately and quickly identify faulty HTML elements.