On the analysis of cascading style sheets
Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web
Automated analysis of CSS rules to support style maintenance
Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering
Compiling mockups to flexible UIs
Proceedings of the 2013 9th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering
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Authoring CSS is a complex, time consuming task requiring not only skilled human graphic designers but also skilled human coders. Practice shows that today human authored code is still superior to machine generated CSS, but the code characteristics which make the difference have not been researched or even quantified yet. In this paper we introduce the abstractness factor, a quality metric which reveals the advantages of human authored code and can serve as an optimization criterion and benchmark for automated CSS coding. We argue that a high abstractness factor represents a high maintainability and reusability of the presentation document as well as the content document. By an evaluation of 100,000 HTML pages randomly gathered from the Web we show that today’s typical style sheet document has a significantly higher abstractness factor compared to code fully machine generated by state-of-the-art applications.