Final Thoughts
Browser macros are extremely easy to create and are extraordinarily useful. You can think of them as smart bookmarks, because not only do macros identify the web page that you need to access but they also define what needs to be done once you download the page. The limiting factor is that, so far, the macros cannot make decisions based on the content they download. You’ll learn how to write smart macros, which make decisions, in the next chapter.
Are Macros Really Necessary?
In the past, you may have written script-based webbots that have had success in dealing with AJAX or the other challenges described earlier. You may have even employed a network packet sniffer to analyze your own web traffic between your webbot and the target ...
Get Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers, 2nd Edition 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.
