some new ideas about WA
Cameron Wong
I have some new ideas about WA and would like hear your opinions.
We've many bugs in WA before. Some of them are caused by PHProxy and
it's quite hard to fix because PHProxy is far from perfect. A friend
bring me an idea of making use of the javascript bookmark.(Ex.
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/)
The reason we use proxy is that javascript can't control another frame
which is in a different domain. But if the code is pasted in the
address bar (or open in a bookmark), it become part of the page itself
(I think). We can copy a predefined javascript library similar to WA
and paste it in address bar. Then things should work. The disadvantage
is that users need to jump to location bar and paste the javascript
code manually. And there are at least two issues need to be solved:
1. How do we know that the page has been completely loaded?
2. We need a "bootstrap" to know the instruction and help to copy the
predefined javascript code. Maybe WA is the one.
We can use this technic when WA can't open the page.
How do you think this idea? And is it easy to extract code from WA to
build this javascript library?
Regards,
Cameron
Jeffrey P. Bigham
We could deliver WebAnywhere in this way -- WebAnywhere has a mode
that lets it work outside of the frame on a specific web page by
including a single script tag. I assume that we could load that
script using the location bar trick that you mention below.
I'm not entirely clear what the use case will be for this - it would
be useful for accessing sites that the proxy currently breaks (we're
trying to fix that now, although I think it will be a while until it's
completely robust). Do you think it will be easy enough for people to
use in this way? It seems easy to try out, so maybe we should just do
that and see what happens?
Thanks,
Jeff
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Jeffrey P. Bigham, Ph.D.
Department of Computer Science
University of Rochester
http://www.jeffreybigham.com
Creator of WebAnywhere:
http://webanywhere.cs.washington.edu
Cameron Wong
Here are some situations I observed:
1. Most Chinese users are still using Windows XP and IE. And this is
usually the default setup for public computers.
2. Most pages don't work well with IE. Maybe over 70%. I tried to
build an website directory for Chinese blind users but most websites I
wanted to add don't work with IE, which frustrated me a lot. I have
tried to fix them one by one. But it's too time wasting and many of
them are hard to fix.
3. PHProxy uses regular expression to substitute strings in pages,
which is easy to inject bugs. When we find an expression doesn't work
for specific page, then we change it. This may probably break another
page which works before. Some situations like "\"" are hard to cover.
It's too easy to bring in bugs.
4. I rarely see WA can work with login forms although it theoretically works.
The location bar trick may be a clean and robust solution although
it's not quite convenient. Here is a use case:
1. User open WA in the first tab of browser.
2. When he find that a link is not accessible with WA, he press
shortcut ALT+LEFTARROW to go back.
3. Then he press another shortcut (maybe CTRL+T or something else) to
copy a special script in clipboard and open current link in a new tab.
4. After some seconds passed (when he feel the page should have been
finish loaded), he jump to the location bar and paste the script.
5. Then the page will read itself.
6. Every time he click a link to leave current page, he need to jump
to location bar and paste the script again.
7. If he find that the script is no longer in clipboard, he need to
jump to tab 1 to copy it again. We may disable the CTRL+C in the
script to protect itself in the clipboard.
I think most of code in WA can be reused in this special mode. But we
may need to change the arch a bit.
Yours,
Cameron
2010/6/18 Jeffrey P. Bigham <jbi...@cs.rochester.edu>: