CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2016/M1653 Implement HTML form validation

Implementation of HTML5 form validation in servo

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Servo is a modern high performance web browser developed by Mozilla with Samsung porting it on android and arm processors. The source code is written in the rust programming language. This project implements html form validation on servo browser.

Introduction

The HTML5is a markup language used for structuring and displaying content on the World Wide Web. It defines set of specification which users needs to follow to make web pages HTML5 compliant. HTML 5 defines a mechanism by which contents of forms can be validated before user is allowed to submit them. Servo currently implements support for few of the form elements. This project is intended to implement client-side validations for these elements and extend the existing form element subset to include additional form elements that will support client side validation.

Servo

Servo is an open source prototype web browser layout engine that is being developed by Mozilla Research. Current browser engines are mostly based on single-threaded model. Motivation behind building servo web browser is to build a highly parallel environment, where different components (such as rendering, layout, HTML parsing, image decoding, etc.) can be handled by fine-grained, isolated tasks.

Rust

Rust is an open source systems programming language developed by Mozilla. Rust is a language suited for creating a highly concurrent and safe systems. In performance and syntax, rust is similar to C++ but semantically it is very different. Rust aims to achieve ‘zero-cost abstractions’ though some of these abstractions feel like those of a high-level language.

Project Description

• The project requirement initially stated that we build and Compile servo. Following are the steps for this:

Servo is built with Cargo, the Rust package manager. Mozilla's Mach tools are used to orchestrate the build and other tasks.

   git clone https://github.com/servo/servo
   cd servo
   ./mach build --dev
   ./mach run tests/html/about-mozilla.html

• While building the servo as shown above we were getting GLSL 1.50 is not supported error. We investigated this issue and found that there was an open issue 13515. We found that the error was because the rendering was done with Nvidia graphics card and so we changed it to the intel graphics card by ./mach run tests/html/about-mozilla.html -c and were able to run the browser. We even updated the open thread so that other people can take advantage of that.

Design Patterns & OO Practices

We were not supposed to modify the existing design apart from adding a new behaviour/ability for HTML Element. We attempted to follow good OO practices throughout development. While using enums and also while defining new methods, we tried to follow the DRY principle in order to avoid repetition of code. Servo has it's own coding standards which are checked by running following command

./mach test-tidy

Issues reported by test are to be fixed before pull request can be generated. This ensures that developers would adhere to coding standards. We have fixed all the issues reported by tidy. Further design patterns will be used in the next phase of the project, where validation functions will be implemented.

References

1. https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language)
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_(layout_engine)
4. https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Form-validation-student-project
5. https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/
6. http://wiki.expertiza.ncsu.edu/index.php/CSC/ECE_517_Fall_2015/Mozilla_Refactor_GLES2