wget for seeing page source

better than view source in some cases

[ergophobe]

This is probably obvious to most people who frequent this board. In a previous thread

[webmasterworld.com...]

people were complaining about how View Source can do funky things with the code, like trying to render document.write statements.

If you don't already know wget, it's a pretty useful tool (I believe it's free, open source and available for many platforms) that basically allows you to go fetch exactly the data that is sent to the browser.

It's handy when you're trying to check what is being sent to the browser, especially if you have code that is actually crashing the browser. Since wget doesn't try to render anything, you pretty much get what the server sends you.

You can also use it to recurse through your dynamic site and generate a site of static pages :)

Bad folks can also use it to recurse through sites they don't own and steal it :(

Tom

[keyplyr]

> Bad folks can also use it to recurse through sites they don't own and steal it

And why I've banned several versions, although I'm sure legit reasons for someone using this do exist, I think?

:)

[rewboss]

Actually, MSIE and Opera also show you the source code "as is", and open it in a text editor (in Opera you can specify whatever application you want). And, I have now been told, in Netscape you can type view-source:www.whatever.com and it will also give you the code properly. :)

[ergophobe]

And why I've banned several versions, although I'm sure legit reasons for someone using this do exist, I think?

I've only used it on my own site for troubleshooting. It's great for that in some special cases.

Actually, MSIE and Opera also show you the source code "as is",

wget gives you more flexibility in that you can send any header you want. Can be useful.

Tom

[piskie]

I use Edit Plus as an external HTML editor for IE and Opera. Formatted and coloured, it instantly shows you whats where. Also you just hit CTR+SHIFT+P and it strips the HTML tags leaving just Title and Text (plus script bits)