Hacking Gmail

184 Part III — Conquering Gmail

FIGURE13-1: The HTML-only version of Gmail

It’s easy to see the differences between the JavaScript and non-JavaScript versions

of the site. The non-JavaScript version has the yellow banner along the top, and —

key point this — the URL of the page is both longer, and as you shall see, changes

when you use the application.

The first order of business is to view the HTML source of the page. You can see

that the page is all one piece — there’s no iFrame nonsense here — and that it’s

pretty unspectacular markup. In fact, saving the HTML to disk, and running the

tidy application on it produces the output in Listing 13-1.

Listing 13-1: What Happens When You Try to Tidy Gmail’s HTML

line 7 column 26 - Warning: unescaped & or unknown entity

“&name”

line 7 column 35 - Warning: unescaped & or unknown entity “&ver”

line 12 column 30 - Warning: unescaped & or unknown entity

“&name”

line 12 column 43 - Warning: unescaped & or unknown entity

“&ver”

line 12 column 1 - Warning: <script> attribute “type” lacks

value

line 13 column 33 - Warning: unescaped & or unknown entity

“&name”