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
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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
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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
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Same Web, Different Access
archive.today
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Horseshoes and Hand Grenades
Digital Libraries (JCDL 2014) - London, England - September 9, 2014
archive.today
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Evaluate Web Archiving Software
• Represent the modern web• Highlight problematic areas for tools• Return a quantifiable result
Acid3 Reference Archival Acid Test Reference
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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
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Evaluating Web Archiving Performance of Web Archiving Tools
archive.today
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A Comparative Look
Digital Libraries (JCDL 2014) - London, England - September 9, 2014
Basic JavaScript Advanced Features
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A Comparative Look
Digital Libraries (JCDL 2014) - London, England - September 9, 2014
Basic JavaScript Advanced Features
Code that loads content only after user interaction
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A Comparative Look
Digital Libraries (JCDL 2014) - London, England - September 9, 2014
Basic JavaScript Advanced Features
Content embedded in an iframe (external webpage)
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• 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