MASC
A browser manipulation language by Michael Masullo,
Christos Angelopoulos, Vaibhav Saharan, and Kristina
Chodorow
MASC overview and goals
 Tutorial
 Implementing MASC
 Lessons Learned

Outline
MASC Overview and goals
What is MASC and Why make it
Browser-based webpage manipulation
 Uses the MASC Browser, a fully functional
graphical web browser
 Contains the MASC Shell, where
commands are given and results
displayed

What is MASC?
Great for organizing information
 Simple, clean web browser
 Easy access to shell

Why make MASC?
Tutorial
Putting on the MASC
(: display user's bookmarks
: add the current page as a bookmark
: redisplay list
:)
bkmrks_file = "/home/"+USER+"/.bookmarks"
shell(echo "Old bookmark list:")
(: create bookmarks file if it doesn't exist :)
touch bkmrks_file
shell(cat bkmrks_file | sort)
shell(echo "------------")
echo -n "Current page: " :/
(: append current page's address to the list :)
echo :/ >> bkmrks_file
(: redisplay :)
echo "New bookmark list:"
cat bkmrks_file | sort
echo "------------"
Example 1: Bookmark file
array goodLinks[5]
j=0
while (j<5){
goodLinks[j]=""
j=j+1
}
j=0
newSite="www.televisionwithoutpity.com"
while(j<5){
if(goodLinks[j]==¡¡){
goodLinks[j]=newSite
j=0
break
else {
if(goodLinks[j]==newSite) {
echo "Already Entered"
j=0
break
else {j=j+1}
}}}
Example 2: “Bookmark” Array
Implementation
Making the language: MASC
ANTLR
 Eclipse (with plug-ins)
 Subversion
 Lobo

Tools Used
Webpage
Browser
.html
.java
Masc
.java
MascAntlrLexe
r
grammar
.java
MascAntlrPars
er
.g
.java
walker
MascAntlrWalk
er
.g
.java
Masc Backend
Files
.java
Language Diagram
Lessons Learned
What to do and what to be wary of when designing a compiler
Don’t bother programming anything in or
for Windows. It’s not worth it.
 Making a Firefox plug-in for the MASC
shell would have been easy…if we wrote
everything in JavaScript.
 A lot of things are funnier at 3 in the
morning.

Lessons Learned