The World Wide Web (WWW) is a hypertext based, distributed information system that provides access to a vast amount of information on the internet. One difficulty with the Web is browsing specific information of interest to the user from a large number of resources that are available. For most content browsers, to browse a large amount of data, the user needs to click the hyperlinks which contain HTML-coded references pointing to other Web pages to jump to another screen or page. After finishing reading one page, the user has to return to the original document to select for another one. This is a tedious and time consuming process. Therefore, it is necessary to automate the browsing of the World Wide Web to make the task more user friendly....[ Read more ]

The World Wide Web (WWW) is a hypertext based, distributed information system that provides access to a vast amount of information on the internet. One difficulty with the Web is browsing specific information of interest to the user from a large number of resources that are available. For most content browsers, to browse a large amount of data, the user needs to click the hyperlinks which contain HTML-coded references pointing to other Web pages to jump to another screen or page. After finishing reading one page, the user has to return to the original document to select for another one. This is a tedious and time consuming process. Therefore, it is necessary to automate the browsing of the World Wide Web to make the task more user friendly.

We have developed a Python-based system which provides users a user-friendly scripting environment that helps users to retrieve and browse the Web automatically. Our system is built on top of Python. A number of primitive and high level functions are defined to permit users to write their scripts for browsing on tIhe Web. By calling the functions, the user can easily retrieve Web pages, tranverse a number of links with or without constraint, collect distributed information, and maintain the Web status etc.

In this thesis, we first describe the system architecture of Auto-Browser and its features. Secondly, we will show its advantages on browsing the Web pages automatically through some sample applications. Finally, after the conclusion we will discuss the future work.