Automated repair of layout bugs in Web pages with linear programming

The paper addresses the issue of layout bugs, in which elements of a web page may overlap, become misaligned or protrude from their parent container for fortuitous reasons. It proposes a technique to apply corrections to a rendered page by formulating its current state and associated layout constraints into a Mixed Integer Linear Programming problem. An off-the-shelf numerical solver is used to generate a layout that satisfies the constraints, in such a way that disruptions to the original page are minimized. A probe then injects these corrections in the form of a temporary “hotfix”. The approach has been implemented and tested on samples of real-world web pages; using techniques that aim to reduce the size of the optimization problem, a solution can often be computed in a few seconds on commodity hardware