Mitigating activity fragmentation in the web by empowering end-users to define their own webflow scripts

Resumen

The Web is becoming the ubiquitous desktop. An increasing number of activities are being migrated from the traditional desktop to the Web. However, this migration on activities leads to stringent requirements as for Web navigation. A user activity might now expand across various websites where the activity might admit distinct variations to match the user peculiarities. This leads to activity fragmentation and poor usability where users have to go back and forth between websites time and again. This dissertation aims at empowering users to define their own cross-site activities that spread across different websites. This is akin to the Personal Web vision where users no longer consume the Web as-it-is but tune the Web for their own purposes. This thesis advocates for an ¿webflow layer¿ that being overlaid on top of the websphere and permits end-users to define their own activities. This is realized through CowPath, a Domain Specific Language for end-users to define inter-site activities. CowPath captures inter-site webflows in terms of state-transition diagrams. CowPath expressions can be explicitly provided or derived from user navigation traces. The claimed benefits include: (1) mitigation of activity fragmentation, (2) consolidation of webflow knowledge that is now amenable to sharing, (3) reduction in the number of clicks, and (4) alleviation of waiting times through page pre-load. Different options are conducted to support these claims. Also various aids for the creation and use of cowpaths are defined. All solutions are available for public download.