Hacker News Reader

Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

Are there any existing or developing solutions for visual web scraping? It feels like the only way to capture data from emerging WEI and canvas-powered websites will soon be screen readers designed for accessibility and automated GUI interaction.

View on HN

You could also explore approaches like what puppeteer-heap-snapshot does and extract the data you're interested in from the in memory Javascript objects that the canvas powered website uses to generate its contents.

> canvas-powered websites

Is this really happening right now? Are people really rendering their entire websites into an opaque canvas? Decades of moving the web platform forward and it has come to this?

If it's a flutter web app, yes.

Reminds me of flash, kinda

Rare, but I was curious to know what the state of the art was. It's kind of like the "analog hole" in audio and video recording.

Makes sense to me.

Decades of bloated, backwards-compatible hacks in CSS, HTML, and Javascript makes a purpose-built, clean, bloat-free UI system feels pretty good actually.

This is what happens when you move the web "forward" for advertisers and exploitive data brokers instead of users.

Putting everything inside a canvas is exactly what advertisers and data brokers want. It basically turns your browser into a television. It destroys structure which significantly complicates ad blocking. Might also be illegal due to accessibility laws.

You're probably looking for RPA / Surface automation solutions. This used to be all the rage a few years back, supporting various "digital transformation" initiatives in large Enterprise.

UIPath [0] is a main contender in this space.

[0]: https://www.uipath.com/

UIPath doesn't have a visual web scraping module or automation, from what I have seen. You might be able to build a custom one and execute it with their orchestration/automation tools, but I don't see that any support for that out of the box?

UIPath[0] and many others do. It's actually super common, both needed to support desktop apps built using custom UI toolkits (from memory, xaml and others actually give you something DOM-like to hook into, but others like javafx don't) and it's also useful since a lot of enterprise software runs within VDI/VNC/... so all you have (at a low level) is a "screenshot" and the ability to click on coordinates or trigger keyboard events. [1] is what surface automation looks like in practice.

[0]: https://www.uipath.com/product/ai-computer-vision-for-rpa

[1]: https://images.ctfassets.net/5965pury2lcm/4hwXQpRTQkIIAy2q8k...

Optical Character Recognition unfortunately.

You mean something like octoparse.com or serpapi.com?

octoparse extracts data from DOM elements. It can't OCR or visually process a dynamic page. The page has to have a structured and predictable HTML DOM.

Unless I'm missing something?

And serpapi is just for google searches?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com