Chapter 3 - Rewriting the Web with Chickenfoot

On the desktop, an application can expect to control its user interface down to the last pixel, but on the World Wide Web, a content provider has no control over how the client will view the page, once delivered to the browser. This creates an opportunity for end users who want to automate and customize their Web experiences, but the growing complexity of Web pages and standards prevents most users from realizing this opportunity. This chapter describes Chickenfoot, a programming system embedded in the Firefox Web browser, which enables end users to automate, customize, and integrate Web applications without examining their source code. One way Chickenfoot addresses this goal is a technique for identifying page components by keyword pattern matching. We motivate this technique by studying how users name Web page components, and present a heuristic keyword matching algorithm that identifies the desired component from the user's name. We describe a range of applications that have been created using Chickenfoot and reflect on its advantages and limitations.