Christian Science Monitor - trouble with snapshot

ustaza cassie

Debug ID is D495581223

I can add CSM articles using the address bar icon, and it adds a snapshot to the item record. But double clicking the snapshot goes to a page that says "sorry this page has moved or does not exist" (with links and ads visible but no article content). The snapshots saved this way are automatically named "CS Monitor Printable," which is interesting because I couldn't find a printer-friendly option on the pages.

Example:
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2013/0728/In-Egypt-journey-down-a-Nile-of-discontent

When I add the articles using the "Create web page item" button within Zotero, it does save a snapshot of the article. However, I'm getting Flash and Shockwave warnings when I open the saved snapshot.

Is there a way to get a "clean" snapshot from this site?

Many thanks,
Cassie

adamsmith

sorry about that. We used to grab the print view of the page and that has moved.
The problem now is that if we get the print, then the site automatically opens the printer window which is annoying.
If we get the regular page we get the flash etc. warning you're getting, and perhaps more importantly we only get the current page for multi-page articles like the one you link to. So I'm still figuring out what the best way forward is.

@aurimas - would there be a way to get rid of the printer issue? Probably not, I assume?

aurimas

would there be a way to get rid of the printer issue? Probably not, I assume?

We have the same issue with Gmail actually.

If we only want to prevent printing, we could add something like <script type="text/javascript">window.print = function() {}</script>as the first element in the HEAD when we generate snapshots. Though that would prevent any embedded print functionality (a small price to pay for this annoyance in general).

Alternatively, we could remove all scripts (which is what Firefox does when you save a page). That would break some pages, but I feel like interactive content is not something you should expect to be saved in a snapshot. It becomes more like a PDF (static).

adamsmith

I prefer the less drastic method - if there are some javascript menus and the like that we can keep functioning in snapshots, I think that'd be nice

dstillman

For what it's worth, there's always been a simple flag in WebPageDump, the snapshot code we use, to turn off scripts. We've always left it on, but the author originally defaulted it to off because of the problems it causes, among them things like duplicated ads and, more troublingly, remote content pulled in via JS that can change or disappear later but that appears fine when you initially look at the saved snapshot. The flip side is that, for dynamic pages where the remote content remains accessible, saving with scripts allows the snapshot to continue to look as it did.

adamsmith

until we have this fixed, I've changed the CSM translator to just take a snapshot of the current page. The code for getting the print view is commented out in the translator, will take a couple of secs to put in once we've got the print window issue fixed.

adamsmith

Dan - do you have a preference either way? As I say, I'd prefer just disabling the print pop-up, but I don't feel very strongly about this as long as we can get the fix out.

dstillman

I don't have a preference at the moment — I think we'd need to try it both ways on a bunch of sites and evaluate the results.

aurimas

What I said above only covers half of the problem (opening a saved snapshot). We still have an issue with print dialog popping up during the saving. That is more complicated to solve (but possible)