ScreenScraping

Screen scraping is the extraction of information from a client-side depiction of a piece of information.

In the context of web pages, it is the process of parsing and extracting information from the HTML delivered to the web browser. This is in contrast, for instance, to having access to more highly-structured representations of that information on the server side. For example, if server-side includes are used, the screen scraper sees those includes as they are presented by the web browser as part of the single page, rather than in distinctly separate files as they might exist on the web server. Or, consider other server-side interpreted files like embedded Perl and PHP files, or data pulled from an SQL-type database--the screen scraper has no access to the underlying structure from the content of those files, and must work only on the shallow information surface presented at last by the server to the client.

An extreme case of screen scraping would be taking a bitmapped image of a text document and applying optical character recognition to reconstruct a representation of the document in some kind of character encoding like ASCII or Unicode.

See also: Wiki:ScreenScraper?

I would think you should write here about ScreenScraping, specificly from the point of view of InterWikiSoftware. Write about where InterWikiSoftware uses ScreenScraping, etc., etc.,. -- LionKimbro Startup Web Design Fashion Trends Blog