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I can't reply to the other subcomments because of the downvotes. Just to be clear, I'm not against scraping. Done it myself plenty, point was that it's hard to
by ricardo81 5y ago
I can't reply to the other subcomments because of the downvotes.
Just to be clear, I'm not against scraping. Done it myself plenty, point was that it's hard to maintain and if I were to make a tool for the masses, it'd be in a UI that highlights elements and lets you select them rather than dig around the DOM. Pretty sure things like this have existed for 10 years +
- Vinnl 5y agoAh that's fine, this is explicitly not a tool for the masses. The problem I had with tools like the ones you describe are that either they just use string matching, or the selectors they generate are particularly brittle (e.g. incorporating randomised class names, like you mentioned elsewhere). Given that there wasn't really an alternative to scraping for me, I wanted to at least be able to pick selectors myself that were less likely to break with minor changes. Then I figured there might be more people who know CSS and have the same desires, hence my sharing it here :)
- ricardo81 5y agoI do have some code lying around somewhere that would revive wordpress blogs via wayback, using a UI where you could select elements in the 'theme' and restore the backend database. It's simply a messy business IMO. But for one off jobs, scraping is the go to.