Summary Companies often employ (i18n) frameworks to provide translated text and localized media content on their websites in order to effectively communicate with a global audience. However, the varying lengths of text from different languages can cause undesired distortions in the layout of a web page. Such distortions, called Internationalization Presentation Failures (IPFs), can negatively affect the aesthetics or usability of the website. Most of the existing automated techniques developed for assisting repair of IPFs either produce fixes that are likely to significantly reduce the legibility and attractiveness of the pages or are limited to only detecting IPFs, with the actual repair itself remaining a labour intensive manual task. To address this problem, we propose a search‐based technique for automatically repairing IPFs in web applications, while ensuring a legible and attractive page. The empirical evaluation of our approach reported that our approach was able to successfully resolve 94% of the detected IPFs for 46 real‐world web pages. In a user study, participants rated the visual quality of our fixes significantly higher than the unfixed versions and also considered the repairs generated by our approach to be notably more legible and visually appealing than the repairs generated by existing techniques.

Web developers employ internationalization frameworks to automate web page translations and enable their web apps to more easily communicate with a global audience. However, the change of text size in different languages can lead to distortions in the translated web page's layout. These distortions are known as Internationalization Presentation Failures (IPFs). Debugging these IPFs can be a tedious and error-prone process. Previous research efforts to develop an automatic IPF repair technique could compromise the attractiveness and readability of the repaired web page. In this paper, we present a novel approach that can rapidly repair IPFs and maintain the readability and the attractiveness of the web page. Our approach models the correct layout of a web page as a system of constraints. The solution to the system represents the new and correct layout of the web page that resolves its IPFs. In the evaluation, we found that our approach could more quickly produce repairs that were rated as more attractive and more readable than those produced by a prior state-of-the-art technique.

A consistent cross-browser user experience is crucial for the success of a website. Layout Cross Browser Issues (XBIs) can severely undermine a website’s success by causing web pages to render incorrectly in certain browsers, thereby negatively impacting users’ impression of the quality and services that the web page delivers. Existing Cross Browser Testing (XBT) techniques can only detect XBIs in websites. Repairing them is, hitherto, a manual task that is labor intensive and requires significant expertise. Addressing this concern, our paper proposes a technique for automatically repairing layout XBIs in websites using guided search-based techniques. Our empirical evaluation showed that our approach was able to successfully fix 86% of layout XBIs reported for 15 different web pages studied, thereby improving their cross-browser consistency.

Differences in the rendering of a website across different browsers can cause inconsistencies in its appearance and usability, resulting in Layout Cross Browser Issues (XBIs). Such XBIs can negatively impact the functionality of a website as well as users’ impressions of its trustworthiness and reliability. Existing techniques can only detect XBIs, and therefore require developers to manually perform the labor intensive task of repair. In this demo paper we introduce our tool, XFix, that automatically repairs layout XBIs in web applications. To the best of our knowledge, XFix is the first automated technique for generating XBI repairs.

Web application internationalization frameworks allow businesses to more easily market and sell their products and services around the world. However, internationalization can lead to problems. Text expansion and contraction after translation may result in a distortion of the layout of the translated versions of a webpage, which can reduce their usability and aesthetics. In this paper, we investigate and report on the frequency and severity of different types of failures in webpages' user interfaces that are due to internationalization. In our study, we analyzed 449 real world internationalized webpages. Our results showed that internationalization failures occur frequently and they range significantly in terms of severity and impact on the web applications. These findings motivate and guide future work in this area.

Web applications can be easily made available to an international audience by leveraging frameworks and tools for automatic translation and localization. However, these automated changes can distort the appearance of web applications since it is challenging for developers to design their websites to accommodate the expansion and contraction of text after it is translated to another language. Existing web testing techniques do not support developers in checking for these types of problems and manually checking every page in every language can be a labor intensive and error prone task. To address this problem, we introduce an automated technique for detecting when a web page's appearance has been distorted due to internationalization efforts and identifying the HTML elements or text responsible for the observed problem. In evaluation, our approach was able to detect internationalization problems in a set of 54 web applications with high precision and recall and was able to accurately identify the underlying elements in the web pages that led to the observed problem.