Farewell

[Michael Tamm]

Hi all,

this is the last message I'm sending to this group.

I started the FLB project in the year 2009 to demonstrate, that it is possible to automatically test web applications for layout bugs.

I developed an API, which allowed to add more layout bug detectors (each layout bug detector detects a certain kind of layout bug)

and I still have ideas for several new layout bug detectors.

But after six years the ideas are still in my head and I did not manage to express them in code.

And if I'm honest to myself, I don't think I will do it in the near future, because I have other interesting projects.

Some people experienced problems when using FLB. Besides class path issues it turned out to be hard

to stop animation on real world web sites (a precondition for most of the FLB layout bug detectors).

Some problems, I looked at, also indicated, that the web page layout changed, when the color of the

displayed text was changed (which should not be the case, but that's how the screenshots looked like).

Therefore I wonder, if there might be a better approach to detecting layout bugs than manipulating

the analyzed web page and taking screenshots.

BTW, I made good experiences with JavaScript code, which gets the offset and the dimension (via jQuery)

of certain DOM elements and reduces the font size if overlapping is detected -- this way I do not only detect

layout bugs, but fix them too on the fly. :)

In a nutshell, I will not invest any more time in FLB in the near future.

And because the are no other contributors, the project is practically dead.

Kind regards, Michael