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Websites as graphs
Author(s):
Sala
Institution:
(unknown)
Year:
2006
URL:
http://www.aharef.info/2006/05/websites_as_graphs.htm
Project Description:
Everyday, we look at dozens of websites. The structure of these websites is defined in HTML, the lingua franca for publishing information on the web. Your browser's job is to render the HTML according to the specs (most of the time, at least). You can look at the code behind any website by selecting the "View source" tab somewhere in your browser's menu.

HTML consists of so-called tags, like the A tag for links, IMG tag for images and so on. Since tags are nested in other tags, they are arranged in a hierarchical manner, and that hierarchy can be represented as a graph. Using Processing Sala has written an application that visualizes any inputted URL as a graph as seen from these images. The first represents msn.com homepage while the second shows yahoo.com.

Sala used color to indicate the most used tags in the following way:

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

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Manuel Lima | VisualComplexity.com