3 ms·
Next time they may ask the office to provide those data in PubSubhubbub protocol so that active polling of data is no longer a requirement. Just a side note:
by itsnotvalid 16y ago
Next time they may ask the office to provide those data in PubSubhubbub protocol so that active polling of data is no longer a requirement.
Just a side note:
All screen-scraping techniques are vulnerable to the
“whoops, they redesigned” problem. This screen-scraping
technique was vulnerable to the “whoops, they redesigned and
we go live in a couple hours” problem.
These two sentences sound a little odd to me. Since the original page by James has no comment box, hopefully he could pick this up here.
- tkahn6 16y agoWhy do these sentences seem odd seem odd? Pulling data from HTML is highly dependent on its exact structure. Usually if the page changes at all, you have to go back and figure out where everything is again. Probably by "we go live in a couple hours" he means that they didn't have access to the page and its new format until a few hours before they had to have it ready to send out.
- itsnotvalid 16y agoIt seems odd because like 90% of the words from the first sentence is repeated by the second one. Seems not DRY enough for me. It's more on the style of text than the problem, as I clearly agreed that by suggesting the data source to adapt to publisher-subscriber model (or some xml/json format)
- ubernostrum 16y agoWell, there are two things. One is that my first look at the (new) HTML of the page I needed to scrape came only a couple hours before polls closed, thus adding a bit of urgency. The other is that, stylistically, I'm a fan of anaphora and similar tricks.