On 04-03-2004 05:31, "Roy Tennant" <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > These comments are all good ones, and those of you who know me (and > Walter is in that number) know that I'm nothing if not practical. In my > defense I can only put forward the fact that I suggested a "profile" > idea which would hopefully abstract to at least one level the kind of > maintenance that would be required. That is, I would not want to go > into (name your favorite language here) code every time a page changed > that we were basically screen-scraping. That's a recipe for disaster. > Rather, I was hoping we could come up with a method that would allow > virtually anyone (not just code jockeys) to update some key elements > that the program would then use to properly process the page. This of > course would still rely upon the very tenuous fact that the typical > journal HTML makes any sense whatsoever. I think that the best way to do this kind of thing would be to store a regular expression (PCRE if possible) for each journal/section. Of course that begs the question of how accessible writing regular expressions is for the average Joe. (Though I'd like to think that with some basic instructions a well-trained librarian would flock to the idea instantly.) -- Harold Bakker webmaster virtuele mediatheek FSAO http://virtmed.fsao.hvu.nl/