
The End of Days for “View Source”? - sant0sk1
http://ajaxian.com/archives/the-end-of-days-for-view-source?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ajaxian+%28Ajaxian+Blog%29
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albertsun
View Source isn't going anywhere, and it continues to do the same task as
always. What's changed is that websites have gotten more complex.

View Source is like a ruler. It's a great tool when you're trying to
understand how a buggy was built. Not quite adequate for understanding a
modern internal combustion engine.

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rbritton
I do agree that View Source is becoming less and less useful, particularly
because of JavaScript-injected DOM elements. Safari's web inspector in
particular has become invaluable for this reason. Being able to see the
current state of any element is incredibly useful.

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chwolfe
The Web Developer Toolbar add-on for FF has a View Generated Source feature
which is nice when dealing with dynamic markup (and of course Firebug rocks).

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njharman
compressed js -> syntax highlighter/prettyprinter -> view source

Is that so hard?

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est
You forgot escape & encoded and eval()'ed inline javascript in DOM that
inserts a <script> tag that bootstraps another URL-rewrited dynamically
generated .js. And the best part is, the .js can not be re-requested as it's
it's taken cautions to prevent re-play attack.

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bretthoerner
If it gets to the browser via HTTP then it's pretty trivial to intercept.

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zandorg
There used to be a 'Page Info' option on Netscape Communicator which basically
told you the timestamp of the HTML/image file. That's not in Mozilla or any
other browser I've used (Firefox, Opera, Chrome). I have to load up
Communicator when I want to check a page's creation/modificiation date. View
Source might disappear from the menu for that reason.

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aw3c2
You can display an "info" bar in Opera's sidebar which will tell you that if
the server sends it.

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zandorg
Thanks, that's really helpful!

