1. Design Decisions

1.1. Checking of external links postponed

In the current {revision} we won’t check external links. These checks have been postponed to later versions.

1.2. HTML Parsing with jsoup

To check HTML we parse it into an internal (DOM-like) representation. For this task we use jsoup HTML parser, an open-source parser without external dependencies.

To quote from the jsoup website:

jsoup is a Java library for working with real-world HTML. It provides a very convenient API for extracting and manipulating data, using the best of DOM, CSS, and jQuery-like methods.
Goals of this decision

Check HTML programmatically by using an existing API that provides access and finder methods to the DOM-tree of the file(s) to be checked.

Decision Criteria

  • few dependencies, so the HtmlSC binary stays as small as possible.

  • accessor and finder methods to find images, links and link-targets within the DOM tree.

Alternatives

  • HTTPUnit: a testing framework for web applications and -sites. Its main focus is web testing and it suffers from a large number of dependencies.

  • jsoup: a plain HTML parser without any dependencies (!) and a rich API to access all HTML elements in DOM-like syntax.

Find details on how HtmlSC implements HTML parsing in the HTML encapsulation concept.

1.3. String Similarity Checking with Jaro-Winkler-Distance

The small java-string-similarity library (by Ralph Allen Rice) contains implementations of several similarity-calculation algorithms. As it is not available as public binary, we use the sources instead, primarily:

net.ricecode.similarity.JaroWinklerStrategyTest
net.ricecode.similarity.JaroWinklerStrategy
Note
 The actual implementation of the similarity comparison has been postponed to a later release of HtmlSC