The Archival Acid TestEvaluating Archive Performance on Advanced HTML and JavaScript

Old Dominion UniversityWeb Science & Digital Libraries Research Group

http://ws-dl.cs.odu.eduhttp://acid.matkelly.com

Mat Kelly, Michael L. Nelson, Michele C. Weigle{mkelly, mln, mweigle}@cs.odu.edu

Digital Libraries 2014 – London, England – September 9, 2014

2

Preserving the Web

• Web Archivists Use Software for Digital Preservation

Heritrix WARCreate GNU WgetArchiving Tools

Archiving Websites

• Each tool produces a different result– Beyond manual inspection, these tools have not been

comparatively evaluatedDigital Libraries (JCDL 2014) - London, England - September 9, 2014

archive.today

3

Evaluating Software Made for the Web

• Acid1 Test (1998)– Cross-browser CSS 1 compatibility

• Acid 2 Test (2005)– HTML, CSS 2, PNGs, display spacing

• Acid 3 Test (2008)– JavaScript, advanced CSS

• Evaluated Web Browsers

4

Same Web, Different Access

archive.today

5

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

Digital Libraries (JCDL 2014) - London, England - September 9, 2014

archive.today

6

Evaluate Web Archiving Software

• Represent the modern web• Highlight problematic areas for tools• Return a quantifiable result

Acid3 Reference Archival Acid Test Reference

7

What the Archival Acid Test Tests

1. Basic Tests (6 tests)– Simple image, CSS representations

2. JavaScript Tests (8 tests)– Dynamic resource location, asynchronous

fetching, other Ajax features

3. Advanced Features Tests (4 tests)– HTML5 features, multimedia, state-of-the-art

web browser functionality

Digital Libraries (JCDL 2014) - London, England - September 9, 2014

8

Evaluating Web Archiving Performance of Web Archiving Tools

archive.today

9

A Comparative Look

Digital Libraries (JCDL 2014) - London, England - September 9, 2014

Basic JavaScript Advanced Features

10

A Comparative Look

Digital Libraries (JCDL 2014) - London, England - September 9, 2014

Basic JavaScript Advanced Features

Code that loads content only after user interaction

11

A Comparative Look

Digital Libraries (JCDL 2014) - London, England - September 9, 2014

Basic JavaScript Advanced Features

Content embedded in an iframe (external webpage)

12

• Purpose of tests for archiving tools:– Identify problem points cf. web browsers– Evaluate performance

• Create a means of general evaluation instead of identifying the shortcomings of a particular tool on an ad hoc basis

• Publicly available for further archiving tools and web browser testing

The Archival Acid TestEvaluating Archive Performance on Advanced HTML and JavaScript

Contributions

http://acid.matkelly.com