Smart bookmarks : automatic retroactive macro recording on the web

Abstract

New technology has made the Web more dynamic and personalized, while at the same time interaction with the Web has become more complicated and involved. This thesis presents Smart Bookmarks, a web automation system that allows users to automate complex tasks or easily return to otherwise hard-to-reach dynamic web pages by creating smart bookmarks. A smart bookmark consists of an automatically generated script of recorded browsing commands that returns to a particular web page or web application state. Smart bookmarks can be created retroactively, meaning that the user does not need to explicitly initiate recording before performing a task, but can instead request a bookmark after visiting the destination page; the appropriate sequence of commands need to return to a page is selected automatically from a history of the user's browsing interactions. Smart Bookmarks provides a rich, visual representation of recorded bookmarks in order to clearly illustrate the actions that a bookmark performs, and includes textual descriptions, screenshots, and animated previews of each command. Finally, the system allows users to easily and intuitively edit bookmarks after they have been created, and to share smart bookmarks with other users.