Instrumenting the Dynamic Web: Techniques for Usage Logging in AJAX Apps

It's out! Edmonds, A., White, R., Morris, D., Drucker, S. Instrumenting the Dynamic Web. Journal of Web Engineering (JWE), Vol. 6, No. 3 (2007), 243-260.

This work extends the ideas of my instrumented browser from 2004 to be adapted to AJAX and modern CSS designed user interfaces. In the logging system's most verbose configuration, with every mouse move, the underlying DOM element is considered. If it's different than the last underlying element, three log structures are created.

1. An XPath like DOM offset measure, e.g. the first DIV of the 2nd TD of the 3rd TR of the 1st TABLE
2. The CSS ClassName of the current element and every parent element to the BODY tag
3. The ID attribute value of the current element and every element to the BODY tag

This allows aggregation of user behavior by interface area (IDs), by interface element (CSS classes), and recreation of user input by issuing synthetic events.

One of the coolest outcomes of this is that you can create screen size independent visualizations. We've been using this technique to log some behavior over at FreeIQ and I should have some pretty pictures in the near term.