tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21332048.post114550443451304418..comments2023-08-24T09:22:20.836-04:00Comments on Developing Upwards: Greasemonkey Paving the Way for Frankenstein Software?Calvin Spealmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07161631946662126734noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21332048.post-1145897790661672742006-04-24T12:56:00.000-04:002006-04-24T12:56:00.000-04:00What if greasemonkey started to recognize a way fo...<I>What if greasemonkey started to recognize a way for websites to publish large sets of userscripts that apply to them, and you could easily enable or disable the ones you want.</I><BR/><BR/>That would be so cool. I run across a lot of posts from people that don't know about the very extensive scripts that exist and dramatically change the webapp.<BR/><BR/>I'm not sure that complex web apps will embrace greasemonkey addons soon. I know that the gmail faqs take a negative/dismissive stance towards addon scripts but I don't know of any others that even acknowledge them.<BR/><BR/><I>Just how much development could we push into userscripts ... [could we] one day be able to build entire apps with them?</I><BR/><BR/>I'm rather into greasemonkey hacking, and have a particular interest in completely redesigning websites I frequent. By looking at the url structure and the basic layout of a page, it's quite possible to generate your own data feeds for websites by screen scraping the page.<BR/><BR/>The DOM isn't terrible as a screen scraping environment, there are usually a few bits of semantic info in the page which improves resilience, but you still have problems with site redesigns. Unfortunately, I get distracted and don't finish my projects.<BR/><BR/>I have a half complete redesign and had just completed the scraper when they redid the site for HTML 4.0. I got annoyed and dropped the project.<BR/><BR/>Similarly, I have a parser for oreilly's safari that can grab the full contents of a book when you hit the book index. I intended to create a nice columned layout but got distracted by work projects and haven't gotten back to it.<BR/><BR/>Alas, too many ideas. Not enough time.<BR/><BR/>As for userscripts in python programs, it seems the answer is eggs. Ian Bicking gave a talk on it at PyCon and the TurboGears project makes fairly heavy use of eggs as plugins.<BR/><BR/>Karl "grayrest" Guertin -- I refuse to sign up for a blogger accountAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21332048.post-1145792597473605762006-04-23T07:43:00.000-04:002006-04-23T07:43:00.000-04:00"""Just how much development could we push into us..."""<BR/>Just how much development could we push into userscripts, and how much of a framework could we build out of them, to make them more stable between versions, work together more safely, and one day be able to build entire apps with them? Can the userscript concept go beyond the web? How could something be implemented for a Python or Java application?<BR/>"""<BR/><BR/>I've been working on something along those lines. Hopefully I can start tech/prealpha releases within a month or so.<BR/><BR/>MWMAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com