Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications, Hacker News

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Many Web applications do not meet the precise needs of their users. Browser extensions offer a way to customize web applications, but most people do not have the programming skills to implement their own extensions.

In this paper, we present (spreadsheet-driven customization) , a technique that enables end users to customize software without doing any traditional programming. The idea is to augment an application’s UI with a spreadsheet that is synchronized with the application’s data. When the user manipulates the spreadsheet, the underlying data is modified and the changes are propagated to the UI, and vice versa.

We have implemented this technique in a prototype browser extension called Wildcard. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate that Wildcard can support useful customizations — ranging from sorting lists of search results to showing related data from web APIs — on top of existing websites. We also present the design principles underlying our prototype.

Customization can lead to dramatically better experiences with software. We think that spreadsheet-driven customization offers a promising new approach to unlocking this benefit for all users, not just programmers. (Contents) 1 (Introduction) (2) (Demos) (3) (System Implementation) (4) (Design Principles) (5) (Related Work) (6) (Conclusion and Future Work) References [7]

Web applications often don’t meet the precise needs of their users. Sometimes there is a browser extension available to patch an issue, and if the user is a programmer they might be able to fix it themselves. But for most people, the only recourse is to complain to the developers, or, more likely, to simply give up. Back in , in (Personal Dynamic Media) [13] , Alan Kay envisioned personal computing as a medium that let a user “mold and channel its power to his own needs,” but today, software behaves more like concrete than clay. [27]

We have implemented this technique in a prototype browser extension called Wildcard and used it to build demos which suggest that this paradigm can support useful customizations, ranging from sorting lists of data to adding whole new features to applications (shown in Section 2

(Figure 1: An overview of spreadsheet-driven customization [3] Our approach requires extracting structured data from the user interfaces of existing applications, but we hide the complexity of data extraction from end users. Programmers write (site adapters) which use web scraping techniques to extract structured data from existing applications and map it to the spreadsheet table. Our prototype suggests that it is possible to implement site adapters for real websites; Section 3 describes some of the techniques and challenges involved.

Spreadsheet-driven customization is based on three design principles, described in Section 4: (Expose a universal structure) : By mapping the data in all applications to the same universal table abstraction, Wildcard enables users to learn a generic customization toolkit that they can apply to any site. Low floor, high ceiling : Wildcard provides an easy entry point for end users, since small tweaks like sorting data can be performed with a single click. At the same time, it also supports a variety of richer customizations, like adding private annotations to a webpage or joining in related data from a web API. Design for an ecosystem of users : Spreadsheet-driven customization combines the efforts of programs and end users , rather than putting the full burden on end users. We also envision a role for first party developers to help make their applications more customizable. (Prior work) [3,5,18] has enabled end users to create “spreadsheet-driven applications” which use spreadsheets as a backing data layer. Spreadsheet-driven (customization) applies this idea in a different context: customizing existing software, rather than building new software from scratch. Our technique does not require that the application actually be backed by a spreadsheet; It merely uses the spreadsheet as an interface for viewing and modifying the internal state of the application. In Section 5, we describe further how Wildcard relates to existing work on spreadsheet-driven apps, as well as work in other areas like web customization and web scraping.

The Wildcard extension is currently an early research prototype. We plan to continue testing the system with our own use cases to explore how the spreadsheet abstraction maps to real websites and customization needs. Eventually we plan to release the tool publicly in order to learn from real use cases, discover usability challenges, and to test the feasibility of building and maintaining site adapters. Section 6 describes open questions we plan to continue exploring, as well as our future plans.

Here are some examples of using Wildcard to customize websites in useful ways.

Augmenting search results