Bug 37706 – Web Inspector: Run Independent

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: INVALID
• Component: Web Inspector (Deprecated)

[bears]

Hello All,

We would like to develop a project where the user types in the url and the inspector gets the DOM tree (basically activates a web inspector) . We would like to know where/how the inspector is being called in the webkit source code, so that we can identify it and have it run independently from the webkit.

Warm Regards,
Tom Bears

[Patrick Mueller]

I think we need more information about what you're trying to do, but as an FYI, the web inspector code does run "stand-alone", but in a dead state, if you just run it in a webkit-based browser.  The main HTML file is here: WebKit/WebCore/inspector/front-end/inspector.html .  By "dead" I mean it's not hooked up to a browser session in debug mode, if you just run it in a normal browser window, but the HTML/JS/CSS does load correctly.

[bears]

Hey Patrick,

Thanks for your quick reply.

We want to create a website where, after typing in the URL in a field,we can translate and view that page into a DOM tree structure. (All we need is the ELEMENTS feature from the inspector)

As you suggested we are running the inspector in  a 'stand alone',  We want to know how we would pass the URL to the inspector?

[Patrick Mueller]

(In reply to comment #2)
> As you suggested we are running the inspector in  a 'stand alone',  We want to
> know how we would pass the URL to the inspector?

Web Inspector isn't currently designed to work this way, so you're kind of on your own.  It would be a bit of work, also, to figure out exactly how the DOM nodes are made available to the Elements pane, so that you could emulate this.  And to get the rest of the Web Inspector code boot-strapped.  But it should be do-able.  Just a lot of work.  The Elements panel stuff mostly lives in the files that start with Elements* in the directory I previously mentioned.

The other thing you'll likely need is a server-side proxy to access the HTML from the arbitrary site you are accessing it from.

Final point: this probably isn't a great topic for a bug report, since there isn't anything we can currently directly do to help you.  Probably best place to talk about something like this is on Freenode IRC #webkit-inspector or on the webkit-help mailing list (see http://webkit.org/contact.html ).

Suggest resolving this as INVALID.

[Brian Burg]

Closing as invalid, as this bug pertains to the old inspector UI and/or its tests.
Please file a new bug (https://www.webkit.org/new-inspector-bug) if the bug/feature/issue is still relevant to WebKit trunk.