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Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Design, random musings, and the Web. Since 1977

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View Browser Source (AppleScripts)

Our set of Apple­Scripts was men­tioned yes­ter­day by Zeld­man, and was coin­ci­den­tal­ly updat­ed to ver­sion 1.3 — for those of you in the dark, Web­graph’s View Brows­er Source Apple­Scripts (cre­at­ed by yours tru­ly) fill a still-glar­ing gap present in all OS X web browsers: the lack of an option to view web page source in an exter­nal edi­tor of your choosing.

Our scripts solve this prob­lem by using the Apple­Script hooks built into most OS X web browsers, as well as a few clever uses of Unix apps like cURL, to pick up the source of the site you are view­ing, and insert it into a new doc­u­ment in your text edi­tor of choice (actu­al­ly, the text edi­tor must be select­ed from the list I chose to sup­port, but I’ve cov­ered pret­ty much all the usu­al options, includ­ing com­mand line edi­tors, and I’m will­ing to add text edi­tors to the list upon request).

They are real­ly won­der­ful, if I do say so myself (I use them every day), and for folks like Zeld­man, these scripts pro­vide a much-need­ed fea­ture not seen since the days of OS 9…

Down­load your copy today, and let me know what you think — I’m always open to suggestions.

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Friday, August 29th, 2003.

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One comment on “View Browser Source (AppleScripts)”

  1. Posted by Rob Higgins on Friday, May 7th, 2004.

    Thank you very much for com­ing up with this script. I had a real­ly old Pow­er­PC, and was forced to use Win­doz for the past sev­er­al years and have very much got­ten used to right click­ing a web page and being able to edit the source code via notepad, and I was quite upset (not to men­tion astound­ed) that IE or Netscape for OS X did­n’t allow such a feature.

    One ques­tion though… is it pos­si­ble to get Vew Brow­er Source to actu­al­ly open the exist­ing html file (like in IE–>Notepad), instead of open­ing a new text file for the code dump? Espe­cial­ly if it is a local file, it’s a pain to have to imme­di­ate­ly “save as…” each time you view a new page?