Finding Iteration Patterns in Dynamic Web Page Authoring

Abstract

El acceso a la versión del editor puede requerir la suscripción del recurso Access to the published version may require subscription Abstract. Most of the current WWW is made up of dynamic pages. The development of dynamic pages is a difficult and costly endeavour, out-of-reach for most users, experts, and content producers. We have developed a set of techniques to support the edition of dynamic web pages in a WYSIWYG environment. In this paper we focus on specific techniques for inferring changes to page generation procedures from users actions on examples of the pages generated by these procedures. More specifically, we propose techniques for detecting iteration patterns in users' behavior in web page editing tasks involving page structures like lists, tables and other iterative HTML constructs. Such patterns are used in our authoring tool, DESK, where a specialized assistant, DESK-A, detects iteration patterns and generates, using Programming by Example, a programmatic representation of the user's actions. Iteration patterns help obtain a more detailed characterization of users' intent, based on user monitoring techniques, that is put in relation to application knowledge automatically extracted by our system from HTML pages. DESK-A relieves end-users from having to learn programming and specification languages for editing dynamic-generated web pages.

Intelligent Support for End-User Web Interface Customization

“…DESK uses the PEGASUS specification based on domain ontologies in order to specify explicit knowledge of both presentation and domain information separately [9]. DESK tracks and records information from user actions and builds a monitoring model specified in XML.…”

“…Our research experience is in Model-Based User Interfaces [12] design combined with End-User Development [6] techniques to help users interact with computers through intelligent WYSIWYG authoring environments [9], [10]. To this end, one of our main concerns is end-user development environments oriented to nomadic Web applications [3], which are Web applications accessible through a variety of platforms, including wireless devices supporting mobile users.…”

Providing end-user facilities to simplify ontology-driven web application authoring

“…Low-level heuristics determine the syntactic context for every user action (Macías and Castells, 2005). Syntactic context is useful to obtain local information about where the changes take place in the HTML code, thus providing further support for disambiguation.…”

“…To this end, high-level heuristics (Macías and Castells, 2005) have been defined. These determine semantic context by examining the application's domain model.…”

“…This component knows about presentation structures, and allows for user actions to carry out automatic transformations. Rather than continuously checking for concrete user actions on presentation structures, which would be very inefficient, DESK includes a pre-activation agent (DESK-A) that checks against more general conditions and detects iteration patterns; see Macías and Castells (2005) for further detail. Only one agent is needed in order to check the monitoring model and detect different types of actions.…”