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I came across this Slate article that presents data in a new and interesting way. How can I reverse engineer the website so I can learn, and potentially imitate the technique on my own.

To keep this constructive for future websites, please describe the general steps and what tools I would need to efficiently break the code down into manageable chunks.

makerofthings7
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1 Answers1

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I don't know that you need many tools other than a web browser and view source. You probably will want to extract some of it into your own html/javascript files to test to make sure you have all the relevant code - not sure what else you might need. I think it's a lot of trial and error.

In this particular case, viewing the source would give you your answer pretty easily - it's not obfuscated at all. View source and look for 

<!--**********************PASTE THIS INTO RENDER HTML************* -->

Right under that they include the javascript file relevant to the races and they have the html structure that their javascript uses.

Bergi
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Prescott
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    I'd add that Chrome has plenty of support for browsing the code,html etc. Stepping, debug writes, watching variables etc. FF+Firebug has similar, IE9 has too. Just press f12 and have a look around – Mesh Jul 27 '12 at 14:27
  • What about the `general steps`? – 11684 Jul 27 '12 at 15:40
  • I think the general steps is look at the code, look for the html elements and the javascript code that might hook up to it via class or element ids – Prescott Jul 27 '12 at 16:48