On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, Erick Thompson wrote:
> > Hello everyone, > > I am writing a basic robot in C#. I have had good success in grabbing URLs > from the source page, but a lot of sites are using image maps and > javascript navigation systems. I think that I can extract URLs out of the > javascript, but I'm not sure on the image maps. How are people handling these? Interesting about the javascript; are you actually implementing a JS interpreter ? I think there is open-source code at Mozilla.org. I see more sites with dynamic scripts using external JS functions, and if you're unlucky not bothering to create non-JS menus. Re. image maps; most sites I think moved to client-side maps which are easily parsable - AREA tag. I mean, all you have to do is recognize that there's a link and maybe pick up the ALT text, not actually generate X,Y pairs. As regards server-side maps, I wrote a robot-friendly imagemap CGI about the time that everyone moved to client-side. The idea was that, if you didn't send any coordinates that you would get the default link (same as if you clicked some X,Y that was out of bounds), and the server would return a list of choices instead of the usual dumb "upgrade your browser" text that must bug the h*ll out of blind users. -- Andrew Daviel, TRIUMF, Canada -- This message was sent by the Internet robots and spiders discussion list ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). For list server commands, send "help" in the body of a message to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]".
