Grendel: a Web browser with end user extensibility

Electronic documents, particularly those on the World Wide Web, have an inherent structure which can be utilized. However; the tools to do so have typically been oriented towards professional programmers. We present scripting language features that can be incorporated into tools that manipulate structured network documents. This set of language features allows us to build visual tools to specify transformation on such documents. Subsequently transformation scripting, is opened up to a broad class of users. This allows the tools to be easily extended by end users. World Wide Web browsers serve as a class of tools that can take advantage of this technique. We discuss our experimental browser, Grendel, which has an embedded scripting language, CrossJam, based upon transformation scripting. Grendel has a number of novel applications and a simple visual tool, Spar, to assist in scripting the browser's behavior.