1

Filling in the Blanks: Capturing Dynamically

Generated ContentJustin F. Brunelle

Old Dominion UniversityAdvisor: Dr. Michael L. Nelson

JCDL ‘12 Doctoral Consortium06/10/2012

2

3

4

Problem!• Which exists in the archive?

– Probably the unauthenticated version, right?

• What factors created “my” representation?– Can I archive “my” representation?

• Am I seeing undead resources?– Mix of live and archived content?

• How can we capture, share, and archive user experiences?

5

Which version is in the Internet Archive?

6

Which version is in WebCite?

7

Craigslist.org$ curl -I -L http://www.craigslist.orgHTTP/1.1 302 FoundSet-Cookie: …Location: http://geo.craigslist.org/

HTTP/1.1 302 FoundContent-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1Connection: closeLocation: http://norfolk.craigslist.orgDate: Thu, 31 May 2012 23:26:27 GMTSet-Cookie: …Server: Apache

HTTP/1.1 200 OKConnection: closeCache-Control: max-age=3600, publicLast-Modified: Thu, 31 May 2012 23:13:46 GMTSet-Cookie: …Transfer-Encoding: chunkedDate: Thu, 31 May 2012 23:13:46 GMTVary: Accept-EncodingContent-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1;X-Frame-Options: Allow-From https://forums.craigslist.orgServer: ApacheExpires: Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:13:46 GMT

8

Live Resource Accessed from Norfolk

9

Archived ResourceSubmitted from Norfolk

• Submitted to WebCite from Norfolk

10

Live Norfolk Interactive Mapper

http://gisapp2.norfolk.gov/interactive_mapper/viewer.htm

11

Archived Norfolk Interactive Mapper

http://web.archive.org/web/20100924020604/http://gisapp2.norfolk.gov/interactive_mapper/viewer.htm

12

Web 2.0

• Crawlers aren’t enough

• Relies on interaction/personalization

• Users may want to archive personal content

• How do we capture user experiences?– Justin’s vs. Dr. Nelson’s experience? Both?

• What about sharing browsing sessions?

13

Things are better (but really worse)

• Better UI, worse archiving

• HTML5

• JavaScript– document.write

• Cookies

• User Interaction

• GeoIP

14

Dereference

URI

Representation

ResourceIdentifies

Represents

Traditional Representation generation

From W3C Web Architecture

15

URI

Representation

ResourceIdentifies

Represents

Dereference Negotiate

Representation through content negotiation

From W3C Web Architecture

16

Dereference

URI

Representation

ResourceIdentifies

Represents

Client-side script

User Interaction

Web 2.0 Representation Generation

17

Prior Work• Capture for Debugging and Security

– Mickens, 2010; Livshits, 2007, 2009, 2010; Dhawan, 2009

• Crawlers– Mesbah, 2008; Duda, 2008; Lowet, 2009

• Caching dynamic content– Benson, 2010; Karri, 2009; Boulos, 2010; Periyapatna, 2009;

Sivasubramanian, 2007

• Walden’s paths– http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/walden/

• IIPC Workshop 2012: Archiving the Future Web– http://blog.dshr.org/2012/05/harvesting-and-preserving-future-web.html

18

Two Current Solutions

• Browser-based crawling– Problematic at scale, misses post-render content, no

session spanning, misses “personal” browsing– IA– To be released – Heritrix 3.X

• Transactional Web Archiving– Impact/depth is unknown, client-side changes are

missed, must have server/content author buy-in– LANL– http://theresourcedepot.org/

19

What can Justin do about it?• How can we capture THE user experience?

– How much user-shared content is archivable?– What defines a dynamic representation?

• Infinitely Changing?

– How much dynamic content are archives missing?– What tools are required to capture the representation?

• Browser Add-on?

– How much will users contribute to the archives?

• Is this even possible?

20

Characteristics of a Potential Solution

• Browser Add-on• Crowd sourced

– User contributions to archives

• Opt-in representation archiving/sharing• Capture client-side DOM

– JS, HTML, representation, etc.

• Capture client-side events and resulting DOM– Includes Ajax and post-render data

• Package and submit to archives

21

BEGIN

PhD Defense

Background ResearchCoursework

Dissertation Plan

Prevalence of Unarchivable Resources

Current State

QualsQualsQualsQuals

Define factors/equations of dynamic representations – What dynamic content can (and cannot) be captured for archiving?Construction of software solution -- VCR for the Web: Record, Rewind, Replay

Analysis of improved capture -- Client-side Archiving: Client-side (human assisted) Capture vs. Traditional Crawlers vs. Headless clients

Explore how personalized archives can be combined with public webarchives

Background Research

Define test datasets (set of dynamic and static test pages)

23

Current Work:How much can we archive?

• Sample from Bit.ly URIs from Twitter

• Load page in each environment:– Live– 3rd Party Archived

• Submit and load from WebCitation

– Locally stored•wget –k -p and load from local drive

– Local only• Load from local drive – no Internet access

24

Livehttp://dctheatrescene.com/2009/06/11/toxic-avengers-john-rando/

25

Archived (WebCite)http://www.webcitation.org/685EYfYEK

26

Locally Storedhttp://localhost/dctheatrescene.com/2009/06/11/toxic-avengers-john-

rando/

27

Local Only(No Internet)

http://localhost/dctheatrescene.com/2009/06/11/toxic-avengers-john-rando/ • Missing:

12/78 without internet • dctheatrescene.com/…/uperfish.args.js?e83a2c • dctheatrescene.com/…/css/datatables.css?

ver=1.9.3

• Small files, bit impact

28

Thought Experiment

29

Double Click 4x

30

Click and drag to left

31

Submit to Archive

32

Future Research Questions• What dynamism can (and cannot) be captured for

archiving?• Client-side Archiving: Client-side Capture vs.

Traditional Crawlers • Client-side contributions to Web Archives: Archiving

User Experiences

33

Conclusion

• Is dynamic content archivable?

• How much are we missing?

• Can you archive your experience?

• For the betterment of archives

• For personal capture

34

Backups

35

References

• J. Mickens, J. Elson, and J. Howell. Mugshot: deterministic capture and replay for JavaScript applications. In Proceedings of the 7th USENIX conference on Networked systems design and implementation, NSDI'10, pages 11-11, Berkeley, CA, USA, 2010. USENIX Association.

• K.Vikram, A. Prateek, and B. Livshits. Ripley: Automatically securing web 2.0 applications through replicated execution. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer and Communications Security, November 2009.

• E. Kiciman and B. Livshits. Ajaxscope: A platform for remotely monitoring the client-side behavior of web 2.0 applications. In the 21st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'07), SOSP '07, 2007.

• B. Livshits and S. Guarnieri. Gulfstream: Incremental static analysis for streaming JavaScript applications. Technical Report MSR-TR-2010-4, Microsoft, January 2010.

• M. Dhawan and V. Ganapathy. Analyzing information flow in JavaScript-based browser extensions. Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, pages 382 - 391, 2009.

• A. Mesbah, E. Bozdag, and A. van Deursen. Crawling Ajax by inferring user interface state changes. In Web Engineering, 2008. ICWE '08. Eighth International Conference on, pages 122-134, July 2008.

• C. Duda, G. Frey, D. Kossmann, and C. Zhou. AjaxSearch: crawling, indexing and searching Web 2.0 applications. Proc. VLDB Endow., 1:1440-1443, August 2008.

• D. Lowet and D. Goergen. Co-browsing dynamic web pages. In WWW, pages 941-950, 2009.

36

References• S. Chakrabarti, S. Srivastava, M. Subramanyam, and M. Tiwari. Memex: A browsing

assistant for collaborative archiving and mining of surf trails. In Proceedings of the 26th VLDB Conference, 26th VLDB, 2000.

• R. Karri. Client-side page element web-caching, 2009.• E. Benson, A. M. 0002, D. R. Karger, and S. Madden. Sync kit: a persistent client-side

database caching toolkit for data intensive websites. In WWW, pages 121{130, 2010.• M. N. K. Boulos, J. Gong, P. Yue, and J. Y. Warren. Web gis in practice viii: Html5 and the

canvas element for interactive online mapping. International journal of health geographics, March 2010.

• S. Periyapatna. Total recall for Ajax applications firefox extension, 2009.• S. Sivasubramanian, G. Pierre, M. van Steen, and G. Alonso. Analysis of caching and

replication strategies for web applications. IEEE Internet Computing, 11:60-66, 2007.

37

Web Archives

• “Web archiving is the process of collecting portions of the World Wide Web and ensuring the collection is preserved … for future researchers, historians, and the public. “-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_archiving

38

What does this have to do with DLs?

• Improved coverage

• NARA regulation

• Improved “memory”

• Gathers missing User Experiences– Or at least an adequate sub-sample

39

Envisioned Solution

User Event: Text Entered

User Event: Double Click

User Event: Text Entered

Button Push

Ajax Event:

XMLResponse

Ajax Event:

XMLResponse

Ajax Event:

XMLResponse

SELECT PREVIOUS REPRESENTATION TO ARCHIVE:

40

Google Maps

41

Current Web Applications

42

Web Applications with Session Archiver