in reply to Unique spidering need

I do not know if you can do this, with Perl or otherwise, but it looks to me that it goes fully against the grain of what HTML ought to be.

I always thought that the HTML has nothing to do with the actual rendering of the page and that on widely different types of output devices, the page renders indeed widely different. Perhaps someone is looking at it with a text-only browser and someone else has a high definition graphical workstation with super-large screen. If you look through a windowed application, you can resize your window and the rendering-engine should recalculate how it shows the page in your window.

Try it with this page: resize the window and see at which column the nodelets start. I can resize my window over a rather large range before I get horizontal scroll-bars.

What the effects can be of the application of individual CSS-files or font-sizes or ..., makes your task more of a guessing game.

So the best you can hope for is to know what the X/Y coordinates are on a particular system with a particular window size.

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

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Re: Re: Unique spidering need
by cleverett (Friar) on Jan 23, 2004 at 07:33 UTC

    Thanks for pointing out my unspoken assumptions. But I think this is a bit picky. I just want to know what the user sees.

    So the best you can hope for is to know what the X/Y coordinates are on a particular system with a particular window size.

    Mmmph. Pretty much I haven't noticed gross differences 'twixt IE and Moz in terms of where things go.

    What the effects can be of the application of individual CSS-files or font-sizes or ..., makes your task more of a guessing game.

    So the best you can hope for is to know what the X/Y coordinates are on a particular system with a particular window size

    That's why I wanted a real layout engine to work with ...

    Still looking at Gtk::HTML.

[reply]
      I just want to know what the user sees.
      What browser? What platform? What version?

      The user might not "see" anything at all on a talking browser for the blind.

      The user might be viewing the web page on their advanced cell phone, which collapses things it recognizes as navbars into simple menus.

      Your question makes no sense in the context of the world wide web.

      -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
      Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

[reply]

        Ack, I give up!

        I meant in a IE or Mozilla Browser or maybe one of those oddball ones like Opera, all of which I assume (perhaps naively) will render elements pretty much in the same place.

        So really I mean the web, limited to those people using eyeballs on a screen and a graphical user agent.

        You guys have a way of making me feel ... well provincial.

        I guess getting my ass kicked might make me a little more broadminded.

[reply]
      Howdy!

      I just want to know what the user sees.

      What assumptions are you able to reliably make about the browser settings of the user in question? If you are looking at a corporate intranet with every last detail locked down hard, you can probably make fairly detailed assumptions (although the size of the browser window is still hard to control).

      If all you need to know is "does this element render in the top/left 800x600 pixels?" you should be able to do a dummy rendering in a larger virtual window and see where stuff falls. Beyond that, you are trying to nail jello to a wall.

      yours,
      Michael
[reply]

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