WebView API's and getting the DOM tree out of the browser

[Yevgen Borodin]

Our would-be web browsing application relies heavily on the DOM tree
and page layout
and needs to control of the browser, e.g. following links, scrolling
the viewable area.

Android web browser is based on the open source WebKit browser.
It is reasonable to assume that WebKit provides the desired APIs,
like any other browser, e.g. IE, FireFox, etc. For example with
Firefox,
we are able to get all we need through Firefox Extensions, or Java
wrappers (e.g. JREX).

Android browser has its own wrapper called WebView, which is NOT open
source?
WebView provides Java API's to the browser, but the APIs do not have
what we need. :(
We could extend the WebView with the functionalities that we need,
but that would require having WebView sources and knowing how to
compile JNI for Android.

Does our project die here or can Google do something about this?

Thanks,
Eugene.

[themodernlife]

I have asked about this repeatedly in the developers group with no
success. I also brought this up with some Google people at one of
their "Code Days" but I still haven't heard anything back.

[themodernlife]

I've opened a bug report

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=368