1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to data processing and, in particular, to scripts in a network data processing system. Still more particularly, the present invention provides a method, apparatus, and program for evaluating scripts.
2. Description of Related Art
The worldwide network of computers commonly known as the “Internet” has seen explosive growth in the last several years. Mainly, this growth has been fueled by the introduction and widespread use of so-called “web browsers,” which enable simple graphical user interface-based access to network servers, which support documents formatted as so-called “web pages.” These web pages are versatile and customized by authors. For example, web pages may mix text and graphic images. A web page also may include fonts of varying sizes.
A browser is a program that is executed on a graphical user interface (GUI). The browser allows a user to seamlessly load documents from the Internet and display them by means of the GUI. These documents are commonly formatted using markup language protocols, such as hypertext markup language (HTML). Portions of text and images within a document are delimited by indicators, which affect the format for display. In HTML documents, the indicators are referred to as tags. Tags may include links, also referred to as “hyperlinks,” to other pages. The browser gives some means of viewing the contents of web pages (or nodes) and of navigating from one web page to another in response to selection of the links.
Browsers may also read and interpret pages including scripts, such as JAVAScript or JScript. JAVAScript is a popular scripting language that is widely supported in Web browsers and other Web tools. JAVAScript adds interactive functions to HTML pages, which are otherwise static, since HTML is a display language, not a programming language. JScript is similar to JAVAScript, but has extensions specifically for the Microsoft Windows environment.
Different Web browser software applications support scripts to different degrees. In fact, different versions of a browser application may support scripts differently. The rivalry between browsers in the market, such as Netscape Navigator by Netscape Communications and Internet Explorer by Microsoft Corporation, has led to a disparity between standards. Netscape uses different syntax with JAVAScript than Internet Explorer uses with JScript.
Browser and platform dependent script functions can cause a nightmare for script development, testing, and maintenance. Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide an improved script evaluator for determining browser support.