Glossary » screen scaping

screen scaping

converting a character-based user interface to a graphical user interface by capturing the output of a character-based system and doing a surface-level transformation into the GUI. This is a simpler approach to upgrading a legacy system than reimplementing it, but has the obvious limitation of not providing an interaction style that is tuned to take advantage of the GUI.

Screen-scraping may sometimes refer to the casual substitution of one design style for another without rewriting the application.

In the context of groupware, screen-scraping refers to sending out the screen of one user to others without customizing the output for each user. This allows multiple users to share information for collaboration, but without much control. Input in such systems is handled by sending in input from whichever user has control at any given time, or by combining inputs.