I have a problem: The more frequently I browse a web site, the more I notice all the things I hate about its web pages.
And I seem to have a partial solution to this problem: I can make XSLT stylesheets[1] that will transform a web page A, as received from a remote site, into a XHTML document B that better suits my purposes.[2] I find it entertaining to make these, so I would like to figure out how to incorporate them into a solution to the problem above. But at the moment I do not know a good solution to the rest of the problem, namely how to incorporate the application of stylesheets (and preliminary preprocessing) into the web browsing activity. I would like to launch a web browser[3], browse pages at domain X, and know that when I go to http://X/page, or https://X/page, etc, the browser will render not the page served from the remote site, but will render instead that page as transformed by the appropriate stylesheet tailored for pages from X. Do I want a local proxy server that I can instruct to apply appropriate transformations to documents received from certain domains? This seems sensible, but I haven't examined too deeply what is available along these lines, and I would rather not spend time digging into a dead end. I would appreciate any suggestions, experiences (bad or good) along these lines, etc. NOTES 1. "Stylesheet" *really* feels like the wrong term here, but I'm not aware of a better conventional one. I'm not, as a rule, imposing style so much as pruning document structure. I mostly just censor elements that I consider obstacles, and rearrange the remainder so that I can more reliably/simply locate whatever I'm looking for. 2. In order to transform page A into valid XML before applying such transformations, I first run A through a woodchipper called tidy: http://www.html-tidy.org/ 3. And ideally an arbitrary web browser. If for some reason I have to pick just one, lynx is a strong preference, all else equal. But, of course, I'm interested in hearing about alternative web clients if they provide some advantage here.
