Detecting redundant CSS rules in HTML5 applications: a tree rewriting approach

HTML5 applications normally have a large set of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) rules for data display. Each CSS rule consists of a node selector and a declaration block (which assigns values to selected nodes’ display attributes). As web applications evolve, maintaining CSS files can easily become problematic. Some CSS rules will be replaced by new ones, but these obsolete (hence redundant) CSS rules often remain in the applications. Not only does this “bloat” the applications – increasing the bandwidth requirement – but it also significantly increases web browsers’ processing time. Most works on detecting redundant CSS rules in HTML5 applications do not consider the dynamic behaviors of HTML5 (specified in JavaScript); in fact, the only proposed method that takes these into account is dynamic analysis, which cannot soundly prove redundancy of CSS rules. In this paper, duce an abstraction of HTML5 applications based on monotonic tree-rewriting and study its “redundancy ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: OOPSLA
• Authors: Matthew Hague, Anthony Widjaja Lin, C.-H. Luke Ong
• Keywords: OOPSLA 2015, Security Privacy