Web Tool Evaluation
Categories
Back to: VRC Tool Box
After an extensive literature review, we defined these Web tool categories. The literature often defines no hard lines between categories, and tools often contain combinations of functionality that cross tool lines, but these categories meet our needs for our tool evaluation process. The categories have evolved to some extent, and may continue to as the evaluation continues.
Web tools have in common the capability to traverse links within and between
Web sites. The distinctions emerge from the purpose in and results of traversing
those links. The category descriptions and summaries try to delineate the
distinctions between the categories.
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Link Checkers: determine whether the links (internal or external, relative or absolute) contained within a particular page or website are functional. |
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Site Monitors: provide early warning when the site is either unavailable or slow in responding. |
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Web Crawlers: also known as spiders or bots, travel the web following links and return some sort of information about the pages visited. Search engines crawlers are the most frequently encountered. |
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HTML Validators: check that the syntax of the HTML tags in a document conforms to one or more encoding standards. |
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Site Managers: are used to create website content, to format the content for presentation, and to manage the site in various ways. |
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Change Detectors: detect when the content of a web page has been changed (since last checked), identify the change, and inform the user that change has occurred. |
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Site Mappers: create a map or a visualization of a website, depicting each page in the site and links that connect pages. Used to generate site characterizations and detect structural level changes. |
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Other Tools: tools that do not fall into one of the categories above but have value for remote control. |
