Adit Microsys
Mozilla is taking the Firefox browser to the next level with the Fathom JavaScript framework can understand Web pages just like people do. The framework is helping the browser maker to extract the meaning out of Web pages identifying parts like Previous/Next buttons, address forms, and the main textual content—or classifying a page as a whole. Fathom is a mini-language for writing semantic extractors. As its name indicates, the Fathom framework picks out page descriptions, images, and other items. The JavaScript framework is helping Firefox to understand the content and structure of a Web page. It is being used in the Activity Stream traffic tracker of Firefox
Fathom can be implemented in a browser, in extensions and even server-side software. Fathom is a data-flow language like Prolog. Mozilla’s developers have designed Fathom to calculate DOM nodes based on user-specified conditions, annotations and a system of types. This process helps the framework to extract meaning from parts like address forms, previous/ next buttons and textual content found on the website. According to Mozilla’s senior staff software architect, Erik Rose, the framework is still in the early stage of development. It nevertheless enables the browser to identify meaningful parts on a page and show the summary. Rule sets in Fathom are JavaScript function calls that make annotations in the syntax tree version. These rule sets are capable of giving automatic tuning of score constants. Maybe future releases will learn and generate rules automatically.
