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| Current Version: 1.28, updated 6/19/04 |
[Change Log] |
URLToys Tutorial
Introduction
Warning: Some of this is VERY basic. If you know a certain concept already, just politely skim it until something sounds foreign, then back up a sentence or two and read on.
Web browsers are very simple.
Ok, so maybe they're not as simple as they used to be. You've got Flash, Java, CSS, and all kinds of secret tricks to make web pages look fancy. But when it all comes down to it, the conversations that web browsers have with web servers are very basic, and the data they send to each other is very easy to understand.
Most web conversations start with a URL. You tell the browser where you want to go. For example, if I typed this into a browser:
http://urltoys.gotdoofed.com/
Somehow, my web browser would know what text and images to display on the screen. There isn't really any magic involved here. The browser sends a request to the server known as "urltoys.gotdoofed.com", requesting "/". It identifies itself as whatever browser version you are using (IE, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, etc), and possibly any cookies it has for the site or where you clicked to arrive at the site (the "Referer"). The web server understands your request, and sends back a response with a few tidbits of data, followed by the page's text.
The important part in all of this is the text it sends back. It looks nothing like the page you are used to seeing. Instead, its just the bare text of the site, with HTML "tags" mixed in there. Some tags explain things like "link to some other site begins here" or "image named _____ goes here." The browser realizes that (in the case of the image tags) and understands that it requires these images to complete the display of the page, so it requests them next. And so on, and so on, until the page looks like the gorgeous URLToys homepage.
Now lets say you view a simple web page that is really just there to house a bunch of links. Maybe a download page, or a list of images to view. Perhaps you know a web page that has a list of pages that have a list of links to some images you want. This is where URLToys comes in.
With URLToys, you can give it a URL to a site, and then based on the commands you give it, it'll have that exact same conversation your web browser has, but instead of drawing the page, it scours through the text that explains where those links and images are, and puts them in a list for you. Whether you choose to just download the resulting list, or tailor it to a smaller list to funnel right back into the digging process is your choice. This tutorial will help you lead URLToys to the right links.
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