Migrating web archives from HTML4 to HTML5: A block-based approach and its evaluation

Abstract

Web archives (and the Web itself) are likely to suffer from format obsolescence. In a few years or decades, future Web browsers will no more be able to properly render Web pages written in HTML4 format. Thus we propose a migration tool from HTML4 to HTML5. This is challenging, because it requires to generate HTML5 semantic elements that do not exist in HTML4 pages. To solve this issue, we propose to use a Web page segmenter. Indeed, blocks generated by a segmenter are good candidates for being semantic elements as both reflect the content structure of the page. We use an evaluation framework for Web page segmentation, that helps defining and computing relevant metrics to measure the quality of the migration process. We ran experiments on a sample of 40 pages. The migrated pages we produce are compared to a ground truth. The automatic labeling of blocks is quite similar to the ground truth, though its quality depends on the type of page we migrate. When comparing the rendering of the original page and the rendering of its migrated version, we note some differences, mainly due to the fact that rendering engines do not (yet) properly render the content of semantic elements.