Originally Posted by
paulwuk
Rather than the conventional web browser standard shown on that page linked above
A User Agent string is chosen by the the creator(s) of a web browser, taking into consideration compatibility and other factors, described in the previously-linked article.
Originally Posted by
zozeppelin
At which point you are not passively browsing, you are actively generating server requests.
Users, who are actively web browsing are "actively generating [web] server requests", by definition.
Originally Posted by
tomh009
Originally Posted by
zozeppelin
But you do hit on a good point, automatic agents such as this are supposed to follow the robot.txt rules.
Except KVS Tool isn't a web robot (which crawls web sites without human intervention). It doesn't do anything at all until a user clicks the "search" button.
Indeed, so far no robots have applied for a
KVS Tool Membership, so we do believe that all current
KVS Tool users are, in fact, humans.
From
http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard:
"The Robot Exclusion Standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to advising cooperating web crawlers and other web robots about accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable. Robots are often used by search engines to categorize and archive web sites, or by webmasters to proofread source code."
Originally Posted by
zozeppelin
One could call it a glorified macro
One could also call it
Greasemonkey,
Tampermonkey,
Scriptify, etc., but this won't turn a browser into a scraper, or a human into a robot.
Originally Posted by
javabytes
You are taking the response from the websites and extracting data from it, discarding the site's markup and displaying only the desired data in your own format. That is the very definition of web scraping.
Actually, that is the very definition of a web browser, which renders the HTML markup in accordance with its technical capabilities (e.g. graphical or text-only), installed extensions (e.g. ......., NoScript) and user preferences (e.g. images/style sheets/fonts/colors).
Originally Posted by
javabytes
Granted, this only occurs every time a user hits the search button, unlike plenty of other scraping applications that collect far more data in a more automated/repetitive fashion. But it is most certainly scraping nonetheless.
A web browser does not "
collect" any data -- it renders the web page from the HTML format and
displays it in a human-readable form (as described above).
Originally Posted by
LatusElAl
What happened to the "Time" field on the mobile companion?
The current Engine does not support time input, so that field is currently not being displayed to avoid confusion.
Originally Posted by
miffSC
I just upgraded to 7.7.0 and I still don't see the Fares (fare types with the number of seats?) in my KVS tool.
Regular Availability is currently accessible via the
KVS Tool Mobile Companion.