2008 3.07

Radical Browsers

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.

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

• WebStalker
  • A Means of Mutation, Matthew Fuller
• http://www.potatoland.org
• http://www.artisopensource.net/hacks

Page mashups with python & Beautiful Soup

Some useful tools built into Python:

• urllib2
• urlparse