Comment by solarkraft
3 years ago
> If GitHub's HTML changes to a dynamic React-powered div-soup, that might be the end of browser extensions and userscripts.
But that feels more like a failure of user script developers (myself included). Why don't we have great tooling for modifying React apps (or do we but I don't know about it?)? The amount of them is already high and only going to increase.
For modifying the Tidal UI I had to use MutationObservers, tied to how the components will render. It's bad, I'd rather modify the React app more directly, but hey, it does work reliably (albeit only because the app doesn't change much): https://gist.github.com/solarkraft/edd9d49bcf0f548b1aa285da7...
Can we do better?
> Can we do better?
I hope yes! Some people are interested in this field. I think, we would need more mor flexible, adaptive scrapers based on content not the HTML structure. This week alone, I had interactions about "AI assisted web scraping" with two people:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33555426