Creating Dynamic World Wide Web Pages by Demonstration

Turquoise is an intelligent browser and editor for the World Wide Web (WWW) that allows users to create dynamic pages by demonstration rather than by writing program code. With Turquoise, users without programming experience can create scripts that combine data from several Web pages, automate repetitive browsing or editing tasks, convert other data formats into Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and process submitted forms. Scripts are demonstrated by familiar browsing and editing actions, which Turquoise records and generalizes into a program. In order to generalize the locations of the user’s actions on a page, Turquoise includes a novel pattern matcher that finds locations within an HTML document. Turquoise infers patterns automatically by picking from a knowledge base of pattern templates, heuristically chosen to be robust and comprehensible to the user. With a good pattern knowledge base, Turquoise can often infer the correct script after only a single demonstration. Copyright © 1997 — Carnegie Mellon University This research was partially sponsored by NSF under grant number IRI-9319969. Robert Miller is partially supported by a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Government.