[HN Gopher] Developers are your users too - a defence of 'View S...
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       Developers are your users too - a defence of 'View Source'
        
       Author : jasoncartwright
       Score  : 31 points
       Date   : 2020-06-13 20:57 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (medium.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
        
       | polote wrote:
       | Another issue, is that it is more and more difficult to create a
       | web crawler as you need to render js to be sure to really see all
       | content and you can't know beforehand if the pages needs
       | Javascript rendering. As it cost much more to render js than
       | parsing a html, only Google and a few other big Corps can afford
       | it
        
         | walshemj wrote:
         | And Google does it in two stages a first pass that's then
         | handed off to a second stage for full rendering
        
       | JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
       | Class names should not be semantically relevant. Typically, class
       | names aren't announced by screen reader technology. In this
       | particular case, I think better developer tooling is the
       | solution. An option to hide the class attribute would
       | dramatically simplify that DOM view. It's also possible those
       | class names could be mapped to some pre-minified, human-readable
       | values.
        
         | dndvr wrote:
         | So source maps for html?
        
           | JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
           | CSS files already have source maps, which give you the map
           | between the original and compiled class name.
           | 
           | You need better developer tooling that would show the pre-
           | compiled class name when viewing the DOM. Feeds into the
           | "better developer tooling" concept.
        
         | yunruse wrote:
         | That's true, but well-named semantic classes aid with other
         | accessibility purposes. Making elements easy to target means
         | screen scrapers and user themes can be maximally effective in
         | targeting the right elements.
         | 
         | Some user themes are for visual nicety, sure, but they might be
         | essential aids to some. Making it easier to data-grab with
         | BeautifulSoup etc means any data shown is more portable, too.
         | Data scraping is all sorts of useful, and having classes that
         | aren't minified garble makes it a considerable amount easier to
         | target.
        
           | JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
           | Even with the best of intentions, DOM structures can change
           | without advanced notice. Instead of scraping via DOM
           | structure, why not screenshot a webpage and use OCR? I think
           | the solution to the scraping problem is being viewed
           | narrowly.
        
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       (page generated 2020-06-13 23:00 UTC)