HTML pattern matching. (Was Re: [Seaside] [BUG] in IAHtmlParser)

[Damon Anderson]

Avi Bryant writes:
 > I've long wanted such pattern matching, it would come in handy all
 > kinds of places. Think about automating interactions with possibly
 > changing web applications - unit testing, for example, would become
 > much more feasible. I'd love to do some work on this, if I have time.
 > If anyone has pointers to useful papers...

I've thought about it in a different context: I'm working on a server
application which basically does a series of diffs against different
snapshots of a document over time, and based on information about change
frequency tries to tag sections of the document with "type" information.
I haven't gotten far enough to know how well this will work in practice,
but I think it's an interesting idea. Being able to do fuzzier matching
of logical "groups" of markup would be useful to filter out the noise.

-damon