I'm searching for different "web-page commenters", i.e. pieces of
software that allow to:

- copy complete screenshots of web pages
- annotate the copied pages (underlining sentences and adding text is
a minimum)
- export the annoted web pages in a non-proprietary format

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Request for Question Clarification by voyager-ga on 08 Aug 2002 04:24 PDT

Hi heupeta,

Do you really want screenshots (meaning just the current content of
your screen), or the whole page, including things that happen
off-screen with pages that are longer than what fits on your screen
and including variable elements like java, javascript, flash, etc.?

voyager-ga

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Clarification of Question by heupeta-ga on 08 Aug 2002 06:31 PDT

Hi Voyager

Thank you for the quick reply!

Upon reading your clarification request, I'm searching for the whole
page including variable elements. Ideally I would like several answers
to be able to choose from.

Heupeta-ga

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Request for Question Clarification by voyager-ga on 08 Aug 2002 12:24 PDT

Hi heupeta,

before I can answer your question, I need one last piece of
information: Are you also looking for software to change the formerly
proprietory parts of the web page (like flash elements) or are you
talking about modifying the text content of the page alone? Linked to
this question is: Do you want to output the proprietary information
contained in things like flash parts of the page in a non-proprietary
format?

If your answer is yes to either of those questions, I'm afraid that it
will be very difficult to find programs capable of doing this, which
still can keep the page "alive" (as in "working as it was supposed to
work").

voyager-ga

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Clarification of Question by heupeta-ga on 08 Aug 2002 23:43 PDT

Hi voyager

Let's assume I'm trying to translate most of the content of a web site
in an easy way. I'm basically trying to produce 'alive' copies of
whole web-pages, where all possible objects have been translated. But
the pages have to remain 'alive' and I don't intend to modify the
proprietory information. The output I'm interested in is a copy of the
web-pages where the majority of the text has been translated and thus
still can be viewed with a browser.

Heupeta-ga

Hi heupeta,

There are a lot of different programs to do what you want to do,
however, first I will break down the search into two different steps:

1. Acquisition of the data
2. Changing of the data

You don't need to worry about publication in a non-proprietary way,
because the only content we change during step 1 and 2 is the HTML
content (and if you're courageous, the content of javascript parts)

Step 1:

- Internet Explorer (and most other browsers) can save the page you
are looking at complete with the relevant parts.
- If you want to do this in bulk, you can use a program like Teleport
Pro or a similar Offline Browser program. Here is a list of likely
other candidates ( http://download.com.com/3150-2377-0-1-4.html? ).
The biggest advantage is that the good ones like teleport will rewrite
the links according to your directive, which makes uploading easier.
- If you are trying to write a program, which automatically does this,
I would suggest "wget" which is usually available for unix flavours
but also can be run on a windows system (
http://www.interlog.com/~tcharron/wgetwin.html ).

Now you have your data on your local harddisk (if those possibilities
are not enough, please specify what your exact needs are for this
step). Now we just have to change them (be careful though that links
pointing to pages that belong to the same site should stay local and
not be translated to your computer's complete directory paths):

Step 2:

- Most simple but most powerful version: Use a text editor to modify
the HTML files. Text editors are available widely from notepad to vim
( http://www.vim.org )
- Use an HTML editor like Dreamweaver ( http://www.dreamweaver.com )
or Frontpage (comes e.g. with "MS Office with Frontpage") to have a
point and click way to modify existing text. Only edit the HTML files.
Other HTML editors ( http://download.com.com/3150-2048-0.html?tag=dir
)
- Programming approach: my suggestion here would depend on the
programming language you would prefer and the OS you are willing to
work with.

Possible problems:

- The CSS information might not be downloaded by the program you use.
The result would be weird looking pages.

After completing step 1 & 2, you can just upload the pages to the site
you wanted them on with the upload tool of your preference (make sure
the links are local if there are problems - this is done while
downloading the original pages or while modifying them).

Make sure to ask me for clarification, if you actually own the site or
have direct access to the site that you want to download the files
from, because then I have more interesting options for you.

I hope this is the information you were looking for. If you want
additional information, feel free to ask for clarification!

voyager-ga