Hacking Gmail

Building an API from

the HTML-Only

Version of Gmail

T

he problem with reverse engineering web applications —

other than the complexity — is that they never stop evolv-

ing. That’s the advantage of building an application on the

web: It costs nothing to ship an upgrade to all of your users. Such

upgrades, as mentioned previously, do, however, tend to break the

third-party APIs that this book relies on.

The one thing worse than breaking an API is making it redun-

dantly complex, and about halfway through writing this book,

Gmail did just that by releasing a plain HTML version of

the site. Gmail users approaching the site with an old, non-

JavaScript–enabled browser are able to access a version of the

application that does not rely on the JavaScript techniques dis-

cussed in previous chapters. The functionality is a little restricted,

but the basic capabilities to read, write, and organize your mail

are there. This chapter, therefore, looks at faking an API by

scraping the HTML version — something somewhat simpler

than messing with the JavaScript API.

A First Look at the HTML Version

To see the HTML version of Gmail, turn off the JavaScript in

your browser, and log in as normal. (Or, you can log in and switch

from standard view to basic HTML by using the choices at the

bottom of the page. Either way is good.) You should see some-

thing very similar to Figure 13-1.

̨Gmail from an

HTML perspective

̨Basic scraping

chapter

in this chapter