One of the funny things about "view source" is that I don't actually do it anymore. It's useless for a lot of websites.
Instead, we have to inspect the DOM. You see that when you right-click, you have two options, "View Page Source" and "Inspect".
Instead, we have to inspect the DOM. You see that when you right-click, you have two options, "View Page Source" and "Inspect".
If you do this on Twitter, you see the that "View Source" is useless. It doesn't contain anything. That's because instead of displaying data, it uses dynamic requests to fill in pieces a little at a time.
A couple years back, Twitter made a change were requesting a URL doesn't get the tweet -- it only appears to get the tweet. A "View Source" on a URL with the tweet number gets JavaScript instead, which grabs a JSON version of the tweet, which then inserts into the HTML DOM.
So not only do I end up having to inspect the DOM, half the time I have to write little JavaScript commands on the console in order to find things in the DOM. Inspecting a page now often means writing a little JavaScript.
Which is why when people ask me "what programming language should I learn?" my answer is always JavaScript. This is because whatever other languages you learn, you also have to learn JavaScript in order to manipulate the DOM of webpages.
By they way, I'm sensitive to the fact that while you've heard of "DOM" (document object model) you probably aren't really confident in what that actually means.
DOM just means the HTML content of the webpage.
DOM just means the HTML content of the webpage.
But JavaScript manipulates the internal representation. If you change all <b>bold</b> to <i>italics</i>, you don't search-and-replace the HTML text, you walk through the internal tree structure structure.
In your mind, think "rewriting the HTML in the page" instead of "manipulating the DOM" and you'd be correct for all purposes.
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