Developing Web pages following World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards can make the information more accessible, their rendering more efficient, and their processing by computer applications easier. Unfortunately, more than 95% of the existing Web pages today are not compliant with standards. Fixing any Web page to make it standard-compliant manually is a major undertaking. But, there is no effective tool to transform existing Web pages to make them standard-compliant. We developed a tool called PURE that automatically cleans up an HTML document through reverse engineering. PURE starts with the rendering result of a given Web page and generates valid HTML code and CSS code automatically to produce the same appearance. It is found to be effective for many existing Web pages. A prototyp...[ Read more ]

Developing Web pages following World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards can make the information more accessible, their rendering more efficient, and their processing by computer applications easier. Unfortunately, more than 95% of the existing Web pages today are not compliant with standards. Fixing any Web page to make it standard-compliant manually is a major undertaking. But, there is no effective tool to transform existing Web pages to make them standard-compliant. We developed a tool called PURE that automatically cleans up an HTML document through reverse engineering. PURE starts with the rendering result of a given Web page and generates valid HTML code and CSS code automatically to produce the same appearance. It is found to be effective for many existing Web pages. A prototype is now available for public testing and comments.