Paper Info
Title
Discovering refactoring opportunities in cascading style sheets
Abstract
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a language used for describing the look and formatting of HTML documents. CSS has been widely adopted in web and mobile development practice, since it enables a clean separation of content from presentation. The language exhibits complex features, such as inheritance, cascading and specificity, which make CSS code hard to maintain. Therefore, it is important to find ways to improve the maintainability of CSS code. In this paper, we propose an automated approach to remove duplication in CSS code. More specifically, we have developed a technique that detects three types of CSS declaration duplication and recommends refactoring opportunities to eliminate those duplications. Our approach uses preconditions that ensure the application of a refactoring will preserve the original document styling. We evaluate our technique on 38 real-world web systems and 91 CSS files, in total. Our findings show that duplication in CSS code is widely prevalent. Additionally, there is a significant number of presentation-preserving refactoring opportunities that can reduce the size of the CSS files and increase the maintainability of the code.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1145/2635868.2635879
SIGSOFT FSE
Keywords
Field
DocType
cascading style sheets,distribution, maintenance, and enhancement,duplication,refactoring
Web system,CSS code,Software engineering,Computer science,Cascading Style Sheets,Theoretical computer science,Disk formatting,Code refactoring,Maintainability,Database,Mobile development
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
16
0.69
21
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Davood Mazinanian11097.58
Nikolaos Tsantalis274332.14
Ali Mesbah 00013824.72