[thomb@bossoft.com]

Understanding the traversal process is a fundamental skill in web automation. The BWS web commands greatly simplify the task by searching the list for you from the last place it found something. The reason why this approach is so necessary is that not everything on a webpage has a unique identifier. Well I should rephrase that, web programmers and the tools they use allow uniquely identifying elements, but do not require it. Your thought process often needs to be “the thing I want to read is the first (or second or) element of a particular kind after this thing that I can uniquely identify.

 

Note: being able to uniquely identify an element does not necessarily mean that the web developer assigned it a unique ID.