WWW2009 EPrints

Co-Browsing Dynamic Web Pages

This item is a Paper in the Web Engineering track.

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Abstract

Collaborative browsing, or co-browsing, is the co-navigation of the web with other people at-a-distance, supported by software that takes care of synchronizing the browsers. Current state-of-the-art solutions are able to do co-browsing of “static web pages”, and do not support the synchronization of JavaScript interactions. However, currently many web pages use JavaScript and Ajax techniques to create highly dynamic and interactive web applications. In this paper, we describe two approaches for co-browsing that both support the synchronization of the JavaScript and Ajax interactions of dynamic web pages. One approach is based on synchronizing the output of the JavaScript engine by sending over the changes made on the DOM tree. The other approach is based on synchronizing the input of the JavaScript engine by synchronizing UI events and incoming data. Since the latter solution offers a better user experience and is more scalable, it is elaborated in more detail. An important aspect of both approaches is that they operate at the DOM level. Therefore, the client-side can be implemented in JavaScript and no browser extensions are required. To the best of the authors’ knowledge this is the first DOM-level co-browsing solution that also enables co-browsing of the dynamic interaction parts of web pages. The presented co-browsing solution has been implemented in a research demonstrator which allows users to do co-browsing of web-applications on browser-based networked televisions.

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About this site

This website has been set up for WWW2009 by Christopher Gutteridge of the University of Southampton, using our EPrints software.

Preservation

We (Southampton EPrints Project) intend to preserve the files and HTML pages of this site for many years, however we will turn it into flat files for long term preservation. This means that at some point in the months after the conference the search, metadata-export, JSON interface, OAI etc. will be disabled as we "fossilize" the site. Please plan accordingly. Feel free to ask nicely for us to keep the dynamic site online longer if there's a rally good (or cool) use for it... [this has now happened, this site is now static]