Architecture Decisions

Content and Motivation

You like to understand important, huge, expensive, risky or otherwise special architecture and design decisions.

It’s especially interesting to keep the reasons for these decisions.

9.1 Checking of external links postponed

In the current version of HtmlSC we won’t check external links. These checks have been postponed to later versions.

9.2 HTML Parsing with jsoup

To check HTML we parse it into an internal (DOM-like) representation. For this task we use Jsoup, an open-source parser without external dependencies.

To quote from the their website:

[quote] jsoup is a Java library for working with real-world HTML. It provides a very convenient API for extracting and manipulating data, using the best of DOM, CSS, and jQuery-like methods.

Goals of this decision: Check HTML programmatically by using an existing API that provides access and finder methods to the DOM-tree of the file(s) to be checked.

Decision Criteria:

• Few dependencies, so the HtmlSC binary stays as small as possible.
• Very easy to use: Simple and elegant (accessor and finder) methods to easily locate images, links and link-targets within the DOM tree.
• Highly flexible: Can parse files and strings (and other) input.

Alternatives:

• jsoup: a plain HTML parser without any dependencies (!) and a rich API to access all HTML elements in DOM-like syntax. Clear winner!
• HTTPUnit: a testing framework for web applications and -sites. Its main focus is web testing and it suffers from a large number of dependencies.
• HtmlCleaner