WebChecker: A Versatile EVL Plugin for Validating HTML Pages with Bootstrap Frameworks
Milind Cherukuri
TL;DR
WebChecker tackles the challenge of validating HTML pages against implicit framework rules, focusing on Bootstrap, by introducing an EVL-based plugin that decouples rule specification from code. It leverages EVL contexts and constraints with guard, check, and message blocks to express rules and perform checks on static or dynamic HTML sources. Key contributions include a reusable, configurable constraint framework, a lightweight integration via WebChecker and its EMC-backed model, and a set of Bootstrap implicit rules, with extensibility to other frameworks. This approach enables easier, language-agnostic conformance checking across projects and supports future enhancements such as fixes, broader rule sets, and editor integration.
Abstract
WebChecker is a plugin for Epsilon Validation Language (EVL), designed to validate both static and dynamic HTML pages utilizing frameworks like Bootstrap. By employing configurable EVL constraints, WebChecker enforces implicit rules governing HTML and CSS frameworks. The effectiveness of the plugin is demonstrated through its application on Bootstrap, the widely adopted HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework. WebChecker comes with a set of EVL constraints to assess Bootstrap based web pages. To substantiate our claims, I present an illustrative example featuring two solutions that effectively enforce implicit rules.