Javascript and IsiloX causing headaches. Help!

[rseq]

Hi,

I have always loved Isilo and i use it almost everyday for my medical references. I have just one difficulty....grabbing pages that run using the javascript. Is it possible to use isilox (clipper) to grab these pages? I am not very computer language literate so lay person terminology will be appreciated ;-)

Thanks a lot.

If any one wants to try this is the web site i want converted.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?call=bv.View..ShowTOC&rid=gnd.TOC&depth=2

Thanks a million.

rseq

[iSilo]

No, unfortunately, you would not be able to use iSiloX to grab those pages as there is no JavaScript support in iSiloX.

[Voltage Spike]

iSilo does not support Javascript in any real sense of the word, and, as you pointed out, the linked web site relies heavily on this feature. Even worse is that the Javascript use is completely unnecessary and serves only to obfuscate the information (probably not the intended goal of a medical text).

The simplistic use of Javascript means someone could download the document locally and modify the pages to use plain HTML for hyperlinks. This operation should be fairly trivial if you are comfortable with regular expressions, but you mention that you are not "computer language literate".

Your best bet in this case may be to contact the web master and let him know your web browser does not support Javascript. He may be able to help you out.

Sorry.

[rseq]

Hey thanks for the help. Can you suggest if there are any programes out there that can grab a java enabled web site and render it in html? I'm sure it would help a lot.

rseq

[Voltage Spike]

Just for clarification, the site uses Javascript, not Java (I know, confusing).

The problem is that Javascript (also known as Ecmascript) is dynamic. HTML is static (with some exceptions). In most cases the conversion doesn't make sense, so there is little need for such a tool. Your case is special in that the site uses Javascript to implement static functionality.

[rseq]

Thanks Voltage.

But does that mean that I can never convert a java script page into static html? I have so many websites that use the same thing.

Rseq

[Voltage Spike]

Never say never...

I think the difficulty would be in developing a tool capable of converting generic Javascript into plain HTML.

However, manual conversions are another issue. For example, I took the page you provided and, by hand, altered the links to produce the attached file (index.html, but zipped because of file restrictions).

The effort required to modify the given example was rather trivial (for me at least), but I only modified the top-level page. If the linked documents also require conversion, then the situation deteriorates rapidly.

I still encourage you to contact the webmaster for whatever sites you need. He is likely to be of the most help in this case.

[rseq]

Thank you very much.