[greasemonkey] [Greasemonkey] Greasemonkey as a yellow sticky

[Michael Bierman]

In your case, your school might not actively reengineer the site just to
defeat your GM script, but they might not check with you before making a
change that somehow breaks it. 

In the world in general, it is easy to imagine motivations (including
financial) where sights would want to break scripts.   

Michael

-----Original Message-----
From: greasemonkey-bounces at mozdev.org
[mailto:greasemonkey-bounces at mozdev.org] On Behalf Of Terry Brooks
Sent: Friday, May 27, 2005 11:40 AM
To: greasemonkey at mozdev.org
Subject: [greasemonkey] [Greasemonkey] Greasemonkey as a yellow sticky

 
The notion that a web site will radically alter its structure  -- and
thereby force me to re-engineer my Greasemonkey script -- is an interesting
one.  My school knows that I script against their homepage.
Why would they defensively re-engine their web site just to defeat my
script, when the price of re-engineering their web site is the likely
confusion of  their many human readers who would find stuff historically on
the left, now on the right, etc.  Defeating my script by radically moving
structural elements of their web page around is simply too costly
for their readership.   I anchor my script on the structural elements of
the page, not on any content.  If I place my script on their web page
relatively abstractly by using XPath to target, say, the "third table in the
DOM", my "yellow sticky" script might last quite a long time.

Terrence A. Brooks
The Information School
University of Washington
Box 352840
Seattle, WA 98195-2840
voice: 206 543-2646
fax: 206 616-3152
e-mail: tabrooks at u.washington.edu
http://faculty.washington.edu/tabrooks/