[HN Gopher] Developers are your users too - a defence of 'View S... ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-06-13 23:00 UTC)