[GTALUG] pnc empower browser;

[Clifford Ilkay]

On Sat, Dec 16, 2017 at 7:01 PM, Steve Petrie, P.Eng. via talk <
talk at gtalug.org> wrote:

> Proposed New Subject Line For This Topic:
>
> pnc empower browser;
>
> pnc == pick-and-choose;
> empower == empower the user to control what part(s) of the web page will
> be rendered / actioned;
>
> * * *
>
> Please see my comments below on Myles's python prototype.
>
> Steve
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: Myles Braithwaite 👾
> To: GTALUG Talk
> Cc: Steve Petrie, P.Eng.
> Sent: Friday, December 15, 2017 11:46 AM
> Subject: Re: [GTALUG] [browser bitching] Re: Programming languages (in
> comparison?) - -was Learn Swift for Apple/iOS. Learn ??? for Google/Android.
>
>
> Steve Petrie, P.Eng. via talk wrote:
>
>> Headless Chrome and the Puppeteer Library for Scraping and Testing the
>>> Web   Wednesday 29 November
>>> http://www.i-programmer.info/news/87/11344.html
>>>
>>> With the advent of Single Page Applications, scraping pages for
>>> information as well as running automated user interaction tests has
>>> become much harder due to its highly dynamic nature. The solution?
>>> Headless Chrome and the Puppeteer library.
>>> ...
>>> There's just one caveat. Since CDP only works with Chromium, Chrome and
>>> other Blink-based browsers, so does Puppeteer. If you require more than
>>> that, then sticking to Selenium and its WebDriver API still remains the
>>> best option..
>>> ===
>>>
>>> The Selenium WebDriver API might be a useful code base to be considered,
>>> in the design of the p'n'c "subversive incremental load" browser ...
>>>
>>> My 2 cents worth.
>>>
>>
>> Thought this was a interesting idea so I prototyped it in Jupyter:
>>
>> <https://github.com/myles/notebooks/blob/master/Random/2017-
>> 12-15-better-web-browser/notebook.ipynb>
>>
>> My 2 cents worth of programming :-).
>>
>
> Nice work !! I've never had to try to read python code before. Looks quite
> intuitive.
>
> Myles's prototype demonstraes how simple it is to programmatically do in
> python, what a web browser does.
>


It is not doing any such thing. It is merely taking the content of a
specific page and dumping it into a string that is formatted for
readability. It ignores anything to do with CSS or JavaScript. Modern
browsers are as complex as operating systems were not that long ago and
that's not going to change. This is a good overview of how browsers work. <
https://codeburst.io/how-browsers-work-6350a4234634>



> Next step would be for the python app to present the web page to the user
> as a navigable pick-and-choose tree for selective rendering of HTML
> "things".
>
> I don't have a current python installed, and I have vowed to postpone all
> future software dev work until I get moved to debian Linux from Win XP. But
> once there, might be interesting to pursue the pnc empower browser idea.
>
> Not sure if python would be the best platform for a serious pnc browser,
> but certainly good for trying out various ideas and libraries. Need some
> GUI power for sure.
>


It's not likely that many developers will be putting much effort into
building a browser for people using an obsolete, insecure, and proprietary
operating system on a dial-up connection.

You can achieve most of this functionality today with a few browser
plugins/add-ons. Image Block on Firefox <
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/image-block/>, though it's
not compatible with Firefox Quantum, the latest version. Block Image does
something similar on Chrome. <
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/block-image/pehaalcefcjfccdpbckoablngfkfgfgj>
You can use NoScript to block JavaScript.

Regards,

Clifford Ilkay

+1 647-778-8696
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gtalug.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20171218/d400c898/attachment.html>