A slang verb, to screenscrape.
Screenscraping is a way of extracting data from a web page. It's based on parsing the HTML code of the page and extracting the required data using string parsing.
It is intrinsically more unreliable than an
XML or
RSS feed, since your code is more likely to break if the webpage's formating or content changes.
See wikipedia -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screenscraping
This technique is often used for mashups (see wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_%28web_application_hybrid%29
).
See also
web scraping
Category Internet Category Glossary