Earlier I discussed the pros and cons of OLE + IE to do web things, vs. Mechanize or LWP.

Screen scraping is horrible, and clearly not the Right Way to access web resources. But sometimes screen scraping is necessary to get things done.

For serious screen scraping (yuck), I'm more convinced OLE + IE is the way to go. Often the pages I need to access involve Javascript, pop-up confirmation menus, file selection windows, and file download windows.

To my understanding, LWP and its derivitatives can't handle this sort of complexity. And to my understanding, samie doesn't yet handle popup dialog screens, upload screens, or file downloads.

In my opinion, there's a need for a solid Win32 app to drive IE in a serious way, to allow access to complex web environments involving non-vanilla pages. I asked a few months ago, but I'll toss out the question again:

Does anyone know of a robust full-featured module for driving IE?

Thanks for suggestions --

rkg

In reply to On being an IE browser, revisited by rkg

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