Standards-based languages for programming Web navigation assistants

Web navigation is a well known task that may comfortably be performed with Web browsers. Typical Web tasks consist of getting some well known pages, addressing some of their relevant data, following their links accordingly to some purpose, filling in some forms and obtaining some expected results. However, some of these tasks become tedious when they have to be repeated many times "by hand" with a browser. Human errors and human time wasting during Web navigation are some of the new challenges that have not yet been fully solved. Some of these Web tasks may be easily automated if a Website oriented client application (which we call a Web Navigation Assistant) is programmed to achieve the user\´s aims, emulating the user in the navigation process of the Web site. Such a program should follow links, fill informs and analyze relevant data just the same way the user would perform those actions with a browser. The execution of these basic actions, as defined later, must be guided according to some user\´s goal-oriented preprogrammed conditions which must be evaluated during the navigation process, perhaps taking into account some data extracted from the visited pages. These conditions are often required to choose next steps during the navigation process. Programming this kind of assistants need not be quite difficult if good technologies are applied. Only some basic programming and Web skills are required to create these programs. However, frequent remodelling at Web sites, nonobservance of W3C standards at most Web sites, and server-side usability only oriented to specific graphical browsers result in a need to frequently update these web navigation assistants in order to keep them on working properly. We propose two programming languages based on well known standards (MSC formal method and XPath from W3C) for simplifying the specification of robust assistants which may navigate a Web site according to the user\´s aims.