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Smart bookmarks: automatic retroactive macro recording on the web

Published: 07 October 2007 Publication History

Abstract

We present a new web automation system that allows users to create a smart bookmark, consisting of a starting URL plus a script of commands that returns to a particular web page or state of a web application. A smart bookmark can be requested for any page, and the necessary commands are automatically extracted from the user's interaction history. Unlike other web macro recorders, which require the user to start recording before navigating to the desired page, smart bookmarks are generated retroactively, after the user has already reached a page, and the starting point of the macro is found automatically. Smart bookmarks have a rich graphical visualization that combines textual commands, web page screenshots, and animations to explain what the bookmark does. A bookmark's script consists of keyword commands, interpreted without strict reliance on syntax, allowing bookmarks to be easily edited and shared.

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cover image ACM Conferences
UIST '07: Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
October 2007
306 pages
ISBN:9781595936790
DOI:10.1145/1294211
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 07 October 2007

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Author Tags

  1. browsers
  2. macro recording
  3. web automation

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Overall Acceptance Rate 561 of 2,567 submissions, 22%

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  • (2023)Assistive-Technology Aided Manual Accessibility Testing in Mobile Apps, Powered by Record-and-ReplayProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580679(1-20)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2021)Etna: Harvesting Action Graphs from WebsitesThe 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3472749.3474752(312-331)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2021
  • (2019)Auto-Suggesting Browsing Actions for Personalized Web Screen ReadingProceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization10.1145/3320435.3320460(252-260)Online publication date: 7-Jun-2019
  • (2018)Harvesting Deep Web Data Through Produser InvolvementThe Dark Web10.4018/978-1-5225-3163-0.ch009(175-198)Online publication date: 2018
  • (2018)RousillonProceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3242587.3242661(963-975)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2018
  • (2018)Arboretum and ArbilityProceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3242587.3242649(937-949)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2018
  • (2018)Semantic Bookmark System for Dynamic Modeling of Users Browsing PreferencesArtificial Intelligence and Algorithms in Intelligent Systems10.1007/978-3-319-91189-2_27(279-287)Online publication date: 27-May-2018
  • (2017)Skip blocks: reusing execution history to accelerate web scriptsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/31338751:OOPSLA(1-28)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2017
  • (2016)uLinkProceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services10.1145/2906388.2906416(305-318)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2016
  • (2016)Following the dynamic block on the WebWorld Wide Web10.1007/s11280-015-0374-919:6(1077-1101)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2016
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