WebVAT: Web page visualization and analysis tool

Abstract

WebVAT is an open-source platform-independent visualization tool designed to facilitate Web page analysis. The tool, built on top of the Mozilla Web browser, exposes Mozilla's internal representation of Web pages, Frame Tree, reflecting HTML rendering information. Compared to HTML DOM analyzers, WebVAT provides access to a cleaner, fuller, and more accurate data structure, which contains layout information, reflecting changes made by CSS and some types of dynamic content. WebVAT provides a framework for experiments and evaluations of algorithms over the Frame Tree. WebVAT also captures user interaction with the browser and can be used for data collection. WebVAT is a working tool actively used in the HearSay [10] project. This paper describes the architecture, design, and some of the applications of WebVAT. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.