Automation and customization of rendered web pages

  • Authors:

  • Michael Bolin;Matthew Webber;Philip Rha;Tom Wilson;Robert C. Miller

  • Affiliations:

  • MIT, Cambridge, MA;MIT, Cambridge, MA;MIT, Cambridge, MA;MIT, Cambridge, MA;MIT, Cambridge, MA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

On the desktop, an application can expect to control its user interface down to the last pixel, but on the World Wide Web, a content provider has no control over how the client will view the page, once delivered to the browser. This creates an opportunity for end-users who want to automate and customize their web experiences, but the growing complexity of web pages and standards prevents most users from realizing this opportunity. We describe Chickenfoot, a programming system embedded in the Firefox web browser, which enables end-users to automate, customize, and integrate web applications without examining their source code. One way Chickenfoot addresses this goal is a novel technique for identifying page components by keyword pattern matching. We motivate this technique by studying how users name web page components, and present a heuristic keyword matching algorithm that identifies the desired component from the user's name.