Robin Millette wrote:
> Le Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:56:55 -0400, Russell McOrmond
> <
[hidden email]> a écrit :
>
>> Tracey P. Lauriault wrote:
>>> Some was asking me what page scraping means. Could you explain -
>>> in sorta lay person terms?
>> A computer automated cut-and-paste where what page you go to is
>> automated, and what piece of information you try to learn from the
>> resulting page is automated.
>
> When it's _really_ automated, it's called a feed or a microformat.
> It's called scaping because it usually also involves manual labor to
> get the job done right, as HTML pages are often modified with no
> regards to its semantic value.
Aren't definitions fun. The difference in my mind between a
feed/microformat and 'scraping' is whether the relevant output format
was designed to be human readable (IE: html) or machine readable (XML,
csv, etc). Whether there is manual labour is unrelated in my mind.
It is often called "screen scraping" from back in the days that a
screen of information was drawn, and then we tried to pull information
from that screen based on the location of information. Re-intepreting
HTML like we are doing here is a bit different, but we are still talking
about taking a page intended to be read by a human (rendered by a
browers) and instead interpret it as data as input to a
program/database/etc.
--
Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <
http://www.flora.ca/>
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