Static validation of dynamically generated HTML

Abstract

We describe a static analysis of programs that efficiently decides if all dynamically computed XHTML documents presented to the client will validate according to the official DTD. We employ two data-flow analyses to construct a graph summarizing the possible documents. This graph is subsequently analyzed to determine validity of those documents. By evaluating the technique on a number of realistic benchmarks, we demonstrate that it is sufficiently fast and precise to be practically useful.