I would love to be able to run it on admin pages (behind a login). That’s one reason that I use TotalValidator and iCab to test my sites.

I think that many sites spend ages tweaking their public face, but fall down on their backend.

In my case, I recently did a project that took about a year to get to version 1.0. I had the public face working in about three months, and spent the next 11 working on the admin.

By the way, I’ve been working on a modification to the HTML graphing applet like we discussed above, and should be releasing that in the next couple of days. Also, you might be interested in this:

Validation Graphs

This is somebody else’s modification of the same tool to spider a website and simultaneously check the validation of the site. I haven’t tried it, though.

The Aharef tool addresses individual pages; having found it, I now seek a tool which addresses the whole collection of pages and their interrelationships to comprise a website.

I feel like I’ve seen something along these lines…but I can’t recall any specifics. Hmmm…it could be useful — - something other than the standard text sitemap.

I’m definitely interested in modifying the Aharef source code — - but I have to admit that I am not a Java programmer, so it may take a bit to get up to speed!

The Aharef tool addresses individual pages; having found it, I now seek a tool which addresses the whole collection of pages and their interrelationships to comprise a website.

But if you or someone else modifies the Aharef tool to convey more or different information about each page, I would be interested. I’ve already noted that lists do not have a distinct color, but also , , and other table tags are not coded red. And you want it to serve a wholly different focus of attention.

…found many references to the tool at aheref.info only to be amazed at the number of people who misunderstand what the tools does, including yourself as indicated in the title to this article, “View your website structure as a graphâ€?.

Actually, I think that the key issue here is pertaining to how we consider the term “website structure.” In my view, as a developer, “website structure” means the structure of the code within the templates/layout of the website. What you’re referring to as “website structure” I might actually refer to as information architecture — - the navigational structure of a website.

However, I can very easily see the difference of interpretation which leads to that kind of confusion. I assure you that I do understand what the graphing tool is intended to do, but that my term usage is simply a bit different than yours.

It’s also very fair to suggest that my usage is, in fact, wrong. After all, “website” is a term which is generally understood to mean a collection of pages, each of which may well have a different internal structure (although, from a usability perspective, hopefully not too different of a structure.)

Will look at your comments further at a later time — - thanks!

I was looking for a tool that graphs websites and found many references to the tool at aheref.info only to be amazed at the number of people who misunderstand what the tools does, including yourself as indicated in the title to this article, “View your website structure as a graph”. The documentation (apparently no one bothers to read documentation these days) on the site makes it clear, but not clear enough, that the tool graphs individual pages only and not entire websites (despite its article name).

The documentation also makes clear that the code is available for perusal and modification. I have thought of adding a color for lists (most of the grey nodes associated with blue nodes — links — on your site; <a> tags are orange) because of their large role under the modern programming paradigm. You could readily “set all non-semantic tags to be bright red, to easily spot the condition of a site in that respect” if you chose to make the effort.

I have found the aheref tool useful as it stands to help understand individual pages and to look for obvious places where little effort can still produce a significant improvement in the code and therefore flexibility and maintainability of a page and by extension of a site. See http://home.earthlink.net/~silvermaplesoft/wgbh/graph.pdf for a demonstration. I’m still struggling with issues surrounding accessibility and would be most interested in your modified tool if you make it.