[jimmyswimmy]

I use selenium similarly to drive a similarly awful interface known as costpoint. I would DEARLY love to know how to use the browser developer tools to figure out what is actually happening under the hood of websites without having to read every single Javascript module. The network tab shows you what is sent and received but it's not easy to figure out how those messages are created and parsed. It would be nice to learn how to debug and step through some of that.

If I could learn the underlying api, I could write a tool that would never change. The ui changes much more frequently than the interface between client and server code. Besides, it would be much faster this way.

[PetahNZ]

If you click on the "initiator" column in the network tab it will jump to the code that created the request. Can also see stack traces, set breakpoints, etc.

[jimmyswimmy]

Amazing - how did I miss these? Thanks!

[mistermann]

If anyone happens to know of a particularly good article on this for non-javascript (but technical) people, please post.

[sk5t]

Please clarify--are you looking to understand how browser events work without learning about the DOM and/or Javascript?

[mistermann]

I suppose something along the lines of Chrome debugging for programmers who aren't javascript developers...undoubtedly there are some fundamentals you would have to become knowledgeable in, as with any technology.

[nimos]

Other comment about initiators is probably more useful for your use-case but there are also "Event Listener Breakpoints" in the sources tab in chrome dev tools. You can use mouse->click to figure out what most buttons are doing (you may have to step through a couple onclick handlers to get to the one you want).