How does spying work?

A robot does not have real eyes to see what is on the screen. How then is it able to look for elements that it needs to interact with? Here's how it does it for HTML pages:

  1. It scans through the page by looking at the HTML source code. A web page is made up of many HTML components. Here is an example of a page that contains a textbox and a button:
     <HTML>      <BODY>      Search: <input type= "text" id= "twotabsearchtextbox" />      <input type="submit" value="Go" />      </BODY>      </HTML>
  1. The robot breaks the HTML down into elements, such as textboxes, labels, buttons, and links. Each element is defined by a markup tag. For example, a textbox is an <INPUT/> tag, while a hyperlink is an <A/>. Let's take the preceding code, for example. ...

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