Web Page Template and Data Separation for Better Maintainability

Abstract

© 2018, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Separating a web page into template code and data records populated into the template is an important problem. This problem has a wide range of applications in web page compression and information extraction. We study this problem with the aim to separate a web page into easily maintainable template code and data records. We show that this problem is NP-hard. We then propose a heuristic algorithm to solve the problem. The main idea of our algorithm is to parse a web page into a tree and then to process it recursively in a bottom-up manner with three steps: splitting, folding, and alignment. We perform experiments on real datasets to evaluate the perfor..