Yeah, I'm afraid for now the mandated solution is to perform all actions through a session of Netscape. I've suggested just parsing the HTML with the various Perl mods out there, and we do that to an extent when testing the actual application, but this task involves specifically testing how things are rendered on the Major Browsers.

It's the same problem as if we were writing a Java client that called an API. We'd want a way to test that Java client, both through the GUI and through the API directly.

In our case, however, the browser IS the GUI, and given that, we need to do more than parse the HTML according to how the Perl mods do it, we need to make sure IE and Netscape parse it the way we think they do.

I'm definitely going to look into OLE to work with Netscape. I wasn't sure it could be used since I saw no direct mention of it here or at CPAN. Ultimately I hope it does just come down to parsing the HTML using the standard Perl modules, but in the meantime I gotta do what the boss says. In any event, I don't think rolling my own regexen are the way to go when parsing HTML.

Update: added 'rolling my own' after perrin's most astute comments

thanks!! MM