I once used a similar technique to mass download some elevation data files from the USGS website. I forget the exact details, but fetching the URL just kicked

I once used a similar technique to mass download some elevation data files from the USGS website. I forget the exact details, but fetching the URL just kicked off a job on their server and returned some Javascript to execute. The Javascript did "something" while the data was being fetched/processed on the server, and eventually decided when it could start the real download. I spent a while trying to figure out the Javascript, but finally came up with the PyQt/WebKit approach. It's the ugliest download code in the world, but it's up on GitHub: https://github.com/jl2/GIS-Stuff/blob/master/map_download/neddown.py https://github.com/jl2/GIS-Stuff/blob/master/map_download/ne... I'm not sure how useful something like Ghost would have been. I was basically using it as a glorified urllib.request, though, and it doesn't look like that's the main use case for Ghost.