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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?