Re: Reverse engineer a website?

[Shlomi Fish <nospam@thanx>]

On Thu, 7 Feb 2002, Paul C. Williamson wrote:

> Is it possible to reverse engineer a website?  I have a website that
> another person designed, but has now left our company.  I have
> been asked to take over the support of it, and I'd like to use wml,
> but I don't want to have to rebuild the site from the ground up.
> If I do, I guess I will.  I'd rather start with the existing site
> and make small changes via wml.
>

I you pass an HTML file through the wml interpreter you'd most likely get
the same HTML file or a similar one as output. You can start with the
case, that all files are their own input, and start wml'ing the site by
using scripts, and modifications by hand. Eventually, you'll get a fully
WMLized site.

Re-designing the entire site from the ground up is another option, which
some people, especially Joel Spolsky consider a very bad idea. Refer to:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000348.html

and

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

Of course, IMO, there are some cases, where you switch to another
language, and/or another GUI library, and possibly completely re-design
the program - where re-writing from scratch (while still referring to the
old code) may be useful.

With what was the old site designed in the first place? Was it maintained
as raw HTML (which of course never scales)?

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

> Thanks,
> Paul
>
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-- 


----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        shlomif@vipe.technion.ac.il
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail:       shlomif@techie.com

He who re-invents the wheel, understands much better how a wheel works.

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