Machine Readable Output

[freb]

For ingestion by other tools we need to create an output option that is machine readable. This will obviously be some type of json with base64 encoded values for the rendered pages.

There is only one problem, you will then either need to store both html and json versions of the output or you need a way to serve up the json file(s). We probably want to support multiple outputs and service json files.

It would be convenient if Chrome allowed you to access the json file from the HTML file, then we could just output a wrapper HTML file that could be opened directly. This is possible, but is disabled by default in Chrome. The real solution is to run a small web server with httpscreenshot. It woudl really just read in all the json and then spit it all back out in a propert HTML file that can be viewed. The nice thing about this method is it makes any future improvements to the HTML file formatting (like grouping similar images, filtering, searching, etc.) available when viewing older json files.