Scan summary and other functionalities?

Use and application of eValid's site analysis (site scanning) features.

Scan summary and other functionalities?

Postby surper » Thu Oct 15, 2009 3:08 pm

I appreciate the work your team has done to execute the tool against our
website - I have some minor questions that perhaps you or someone
on your team could answer:

(1) The report does not tell us which "link" on the page is broken, so we
have to find the link (using URL provided) and this can take some time and digging.

We're looking for which displayed and undisplayed link(s) on the page are
broken and many times it is difficult to pinpoint and in the end if it is
not visible, on the QA side we are left asking the developer to locate it.

(2) Is there any way to tell whether or not the broken link is visible to the user?
surper
 
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Apr 21, 2009 9:35 am

Re: Scan summary and other functionalities?

Postby siteanalysis » Thu Oct 15, 2009 3:21 pm

To give you a good answer to these questions we have to back up a
bit and go over how eValid finds unavailable links.

(1) How to identify where a link is in a page when it is found to be
broken.

(a) The browser reads in a page and renders it and then the site
analysis engine scans the internal fully elaborated HTML code to
look for links in anchor tags (the normal form) or as arguments in
JavaScript (Script) passages.

(b) When a link is found it is added to the "check this link later"
list. When put in the list, eValid notes the URL which is the
"parent" of that link (this is used later to reconstruct the
dependence tree).

(c) All the links in the page are extracted this way, with the work
of actually [attempting to] visit them deferred till later.

(d) eValid then writes all of the other data (pages size, element
count, and all of those variables in the "Complete Data Table"
before going to the next item in its worklist.

Now, the processing of that page stops, and eValid attempts to
navigate to the next link on the worklist...remember this list may
have 100's or 1000's of links.

If a link is "not found" -- or returns any error code of 400 or
greater -- the link is added to the "unavailable link list".

The point is, the fact of a link being unavailable is not identified
at the time the page which is its parent is in the browser. Even
so, the report shows the URL of the parent, for reference purposes.

Because eValid is working with "post browsing data" -- that is,
fully rendered pages -- all notion of line number, constituent file,
and the like is not present. Remember, eValid is a client-based
engine...it doesn't know anything about how the page was
constructed.

What we have found then is that ViewSource is the best way to find
the problem URL string, and the context of the source HTML will tell
you where that link actually is on the page.

(2) Can you tell if a link -- broken or not -- is visible to the
user?

That's a good question -- a very subtle question.

What if the broken link appears in a JavaScript function that is
never actually activated?

From eValid's point of view it is a referenced URL that was not
found available, so it is reported as broken.

In this case, you need to examine the HTML source with "View Source"
to determine where the URL appears, and to discover if it really is
visible to the user.

Hope this is helpful!

-eValid Support Team
siteanalysis
 
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Joined: Tue Jan 01, 2008 12:48 pm


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