Website Normalisation

Well I've completed the Xena Website Normaliser. Unfortunately that was the easy part - the hard part is the Xena Website Viewer.

After playing around with the Lobo Browser I don't think it's quite ready to be used as our primary viewer for web sites. I used it to view a number of different Australian Government web sites (the National Archives, the Department of Defence and the Department of Immigration and Citizenship) and none of them were rendered at anywhere near an acceptable level.

This means that it looks like I'll have to go down the path I was trying to avoid: initialising a web server whenever a web site normalised by Xena is viewed, and using the web server to map the links contained within the HTML to the normalised files that Xena has produced. So not the most elegant solution, but I think actually being able to navigate properly around our normalised web sites is reasonably important.

The Lobo Project

The Lobo Project is an open source, pure Java web browser. It looks like it could be useful for viewing complete websites normalised by Xena, as well as individual HTML files and the HTML preview produced from OpenOffice.org documents. It has support for JavaScript and CSS so should be much better than the default Java HTML viewer which can only handle the simplest of HTML.

I'll be experimenting with it tomorrow as I begin work on the Xena website normaliser.