Revision as of 12:51, 29 May 2008

Just Browsing?

A software "browser" is for many quite possibly the most used piece of software. As a result of it's very persistence and ubiquity, the software may fade into the background, becoming a "natural" and "neutral" part of one's daily (computing) experience.

The original conception of the world wide web was one that supported a variety of means of viewing and interacting with online content. By digging into the underlying network mechanisms, protocols, and markup languages it's possible to create radically different kinds of "browsing" of the material made available via the world wide web.

some examples

Issue with urllib and wikipedia (Setting User-Agent to "pretend" to be a "real" browser):

http://bytes.com/forum/thread500417.html

Page mashups with Python & Beautiful Soup

Some useful tools built into Python:

urllib2
urlparse

@@ Line 11: / Line 11: @@
 * http://www.artisopensource.net/hacks
-== Page mashups with python & [http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup Beautiful Soup] ==
+Issue with urllib and wikipedia
+(Setting User-Agent to "pretend" to be a "real" browser):
+* http://bytes.com/forum/thread500417.html
+== Page mashups with Python & [http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup Beautiful Soup] ==
 Some useful tools built into Python:
@@ Line 17: / Line 21: @@
 * [[urllib2]]
 * urlparse
+== Exercises ==