Microsoft Corporation
Browser based visual debugging

Abstract:

A web browser, editor, and server cooperate to enable visual debugging of hypertext markup language (HTML) code. The editor loads an HTML source file and displays it for interactive editing. The web server generates a web page from the source file and at the same time generates a page representation that is provided to the editor. The browser receives the web page from the web server and generates a document object model (DOM) to display a view of the HTML page. The editor takes snapshots of the HTML source file in correspondence with edits thereto. The snapshots are compared to find a snapshot difference, which is correlated with the page representation. The page representation is updated by the editor. Based on the updated page representation, the editor communicates with the browser to update the DOM. The updated DOM is rendered by the browser without reloading the web page.