dealing with javascript

["T. V. Raman" <raman@cs.cornell.edu>]

If you want to write some code, here is an approach that
will work:

Basically Javascript of interest does one of 3 things:

0) generate content (document.write )
1) Provides an event handler e.g. for mouse rollovers etc
--the only handler that is really of interest is the one on
form submit and anchor clicks (href="javascript:")

2) These handlers typically show up as JS functions written
by the site author -- and eventually end up calling
window.open or something equivalent  like
document.location="url"

You can handle all of these by essentially running the HTML
page through a JS interpreter and telling the interpreter to
produce HTML with the JS code evaluated 
and results spliced back in as HTML.

Look at rhino.jar for a full JS implementation in Java
--take rhino.jar and write yourself the above interpreter
--if you dont like Java pick your favorite language.

Finally hook the "interpreter" above 
into a proxy server and test it.
the proxy server should run JS enabled WWW pages through
your interpreter.

If you build this it will work for all browsers.

>>>>> "RAYNER" == RAYNER Peter <peter.rayner@csiro.au> writes:

    RAYNER> I guess we're all running into problems with
    RAYNER> javascript more and more often.  I'm wondering
    RAYNER> if it's time to put some collective effort into
    RAYNER> a solution and, if so, what it might be.  The
    RAYNER> last time this topic turned up on the emacs-w3
    RAYNER> list, Bill Perry's suggestion was for some kind
    RAYNER> of external parser, rather than extending the
    RAYNER> capabilities of emacs-w3 itself.  The other
    RAYNER> alternatives I see are to wait and hope the
    RAYNER> netscape accessibility efforts make the problem
    RAYNER> go away or to extend the capabilities of some
    RAYNER> other access tool.  Does anyone have any
    RAYNER> suggestions for which alternative might be
    RAYNER> preferable?  If we do decide on an external
    RAYNER> filter what kinds of capabilities must it have?
    RAYNER> The few times I've looked inside inaccessible
    RAYNER> pages the JS seems to be doing uninteresting
    RAYNER> things like drop-down lists which could easily
    RAYNER> be handled other ways.  But I don't know enough
    RAYNER> about the capabilities of javascript to know
    RAYNER> what other kinds of events we might have to deal
    RAYNER> with.  I'm happy to try and hack something
    RAYNER> together to do this provided there's a
    RAYNER> reasonable chance of success; it's about time I
    RAYNER> brushed up my perl anyway.  There also look to
    RAYNER> be some open-source implementations of
    RAYNER> interpretters out there we could possibly modify
    RAYNER> for the task.  So do people have a view of
    RAYNER> whether and how to go forward with this?  Any
    RAYNER> currently active projects?  Other comments
    RAYNER> cheers Peter Rayner



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-- 
Best Regards,
--raman

      
Email:  raman@cs.cornell.edu
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