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Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

geoffreylitt.com

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Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

#21

Post by warpech »

This is the most inspiring implementation of live web scraping that I have seen. However, I think it will only work well on semantic HTML. I don't know about AirBnb, used in the paper, but I can say many good words about GitHub. GitHub is an awesome example of a customizable web app thanks to solid, semantic HTML structure. You can see hundreds of web extensions and Tampermonkey user scripts for GitHub that work consistently. I wrote a few of my own.

As a co-founder of Handsontable, I am proud to see it used in this paper. Handsontable is a commercial spreadsheet component, however it is free for non-commercial purposes such as education, research, study, and personal use, testing and demonstration: https://github.com/handsontable/handsontable/blob/master/han...

Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

#22

Post by geocar »

I've done something similar with Google Sheets and a sprinkling of JS automation. This works well because Google Sheets is pretty good and I can embed Google Sheets in an iframe. A server-to-server POST message sends the (relevant) cells to my running application using a secret key (it's like 5 lines of JS).

Why should I invest in Wildcard's API instead of Google's? Am I missing something?

Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

#24

Post by gitgud »

gitgud wrote: post #23

I was under the impression that it would be another 'Google Sheet' used to configure a web application... This however is refreshingly different, and demonstrates the potential power that users can have over the data displayed in browsers...

It reminds me of useful extensions like [1] Honey (auto coupon code finder), which are generalized enough to automatically detect coupon code input fields in eCommerce checkouts that it's never seen before.

"Wildcard" however either needs; AI to detect and classify unknown HTML as rows in a table. OR tonnes and tonnes of integration code (glue code) for all the popular websites used... which seems to be the plan

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/honey/bmnlcjabgnpn...

Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

#25

Post by tuesday20 »

warpech wrote: post #21

This is the most inspiring implementation of live web scraping that I have seen. However, I think it will only work well on semantic HTML. I don't know about AirBnb, used in the paper, but I can say many good words about GitHub. GitHub is an awesome example of a customizable web app thanks to solid, semantic HTML structure. You can see hundreds of web extensions and Tampermonkey user scripts for GitHub that work cons…

I’ve used handsontable and will gladly recommend it! The only library that can beat handsontable is ag-grid, which is on a league of its own and also very expensive.

I especially love the Excel like formula feature.

Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

#26

Post by tarcon »

I don't get it. We have custom web frontends because we feel our problems can be solved more efficiently in UIs different from a spreadsheet, don't we?

Granted, not every custom UI is better than its spreadsheet version would be. But thats a different problem.

Otherwise, there are a lot of react datagrid and spreadsheet components to use if you feel that would be the best UI solution for your app.

Am I missing something?

Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

#27

Post by jedieaston »

tarcon wrote: post #26

I don't get it. We have custom web frontends because we feel our problems can be solved more efficiently in UIs different from a spreadsheet, don't we? Granted, not every custom UI is better than its spreadsheet version would be. But thats a different problem. Otherwise, there are a lot of react datagrid and spreadsheet components to use if you feel that would be the best UI solution for your app. Am I missing someth…

This is for the end user to use when they need the web app to work differently or to filter data from the web app while it is live. If software devs implemented everything that everyone needed, this wouldn’t be needed, but that is obviously an impossible goal (and even if you could do it, would you want to?)

Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

#29

Post by gklitt »

warpech wrote: post #21

This is the most inspiring implementation of live web scraping that I have seen. However, I think it will only work well on semantic HTML. I don't know about AirBnb, used in the paper, but I can say many good words about GitHub. GitHub is an awesome example of a customizable web app thanks to solid, semantic HTML structure. You can see hundreds of web extensions and Tampermonkey user scripts for GitHub that work cons…

Thanks for building Handsontable! It's been essential for quickly prototyping this project and I'm a fan of the API design.

re: scraping, it's true that semantic HTML makes things easier, but we've also been building site adapters for a variety of modern sites that use frontend frameworks, "utility CSS", etc. Most promising solution so far is something I'm calling "AJAX scraping" -- observe the JSON request made by the client and just directly extract structured data from there.

Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

#30

Post by harrisreynolds »

This is very cool! I am currently working on Webase [1] and it feels important to have a great spreadsheet/data-grid view in addition to other customizable views.

Your demo above is key to making it easy to understand the idea very quickly! Lots of sites could benefit from that including something like IndieHackers.

Nice work.

[1] https://www.webase.com

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