Chapter 7. Reading Between the Lines

 

All finite things reveal infinitude.

 
 --Theodore Roethke (1908–1963), U.S. poet

Introduction

What you see on your browser isn't necessarily what you get. Whenever you view a Web page through a browser, you see only the browser's interpretation and rendering of the content delivered to it. What stays hidden from view is a vast amount of information. To uncover these hidden treasures is to move beyond browsing and enter into a genuine understanding of the nearly infinite variations of Web technologies.

From a typical Web page on the Internet, you can find information such as comments embedded in the HTML code, source code of client-side scripts, keywords for referencing pages, hidden parameters passed in ...

Get Web Hacking: Attacks and Defense now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial