When I look up today’s date on the Wikipedia, I mostly see a list of events, as well as births and deaths on this date. Each of these contains a link and a very brief summary.
If you mouse over the link, you often see a pop-up image. The image you see is the first image on the page being linked to, and it only shows up if that page contains an image.
Suppose I wanted to create an on-line gallery of all of those images. I could do it manually, cutting and pasting images one by one, but that would take a lot of work.
Or I could write a “robot” that simulates a user, hovering over each link in tern and capturing the image that results, if any.
Or I could write a script that interprets the HTML of the Wikipedia page, follows the links and looks for that first image tag.
But what I really want is software that would let me just say “Arrange all of the images that pop-up over links into a gallery, and make a web page of that.” Or something like that.
The software that does this for me wouldn’t need to be something that understands English. It could be some sort of graphic user interface that lets me create such requests by clicking and dragging on the screen.
Is that asking too much?