End-User Browser-Side Modification of Web Pages

The increasing volume of content and actions available on the Web, combined with the growing number of mature digital natives, anticipate a growing desire of controlling the Web experience. Akin to the Web2.0 movement, webies’ desires do not stop at content authoring but look for controlling how content is arranged in websites. By content, we mainly refer to HTML pages, better said, their runtime representation: DOM trees. The vision is for users to “prune” (removing nodes) or “graft” (adding nodes) existing DOM trees to improve their idiosyncratic and situational Web experience. Hence, Web content is no longer consumed as canned by Web masters. Rather, users can remove content of no interest, or place new content from somewhere else. This vision accounts for a post-production user-driven Web customization (referred to as

“Web Modding”

). Being user driven, appropriate abstractions and tools are needed. The paper introduces a set of abstractions (formalized in terms of a domain-specific language) and an IDE (realized as an add-on from

Google Chrome

) to empower non-programmers to achieve HTML rearrangement. The paper discusses the technical issues and the results of a first validation.