One of the constant nuisances associated with mashup/extension/ greasemonkey development is having to develop a regular expression to retrieve data from some DOM node of an HTTP response text string. Google Gears/Chrome seems to offer a good juncture to try to develop a simpler way to gather useful data on the web. This could come in the form of an object model, or a query function (some kind of query generator linked to a GUI tool like Firebug would be nice).
Remember that most of the important things that people check on the web have strict defenses around them to prevent the information from being commoditized. No operator of a travel web site wants their data to be easily readable by anyone other than a person browsing their web site. No retail merchandiser wants to provide people with a straightforward way to do price comparison across multiple vendors. They will resist any effort to develop an open standard for data interchange. This is something that was overlooked when momentum gathered behind the XML web services idea. There is long standing value in the ability to reverse engineer formatted data presented in HTML. Adding generic functionality that addresses this in Gears would be a major step forward.
