I find myself having to interact with a web page that hides state in various places so that one cannot easily share it as a URL, for example this page which allows users to look up information from city zoning applications:
https://aca.cityofberkeley.info/community/Default.aspx
You can interact with the page all you want, but the URL in the location bar will remain the same as the above.
Currently, city staff provide users with instructions like "Load this URL, click on the 'Zoning' tab, enter DRCP2020-0010 under the 'Permit Number' field, click 'Search', then when the records come up, click 'Record Info' and then select 'Attachments' from the dropdown menu, then click on the PDF document that says '2020-10-21_DRCP_APP_PCKT_2801 Adeline.pdf'". I would like to be able to replace these instructions with a URL.
Another example is the website where video from city council meetings is archived:
http://berkeley.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?publish_id=cbebb4e6-5b83-11eb-920e-0050569183fa
It would be nice to be able to produce a link which brings up one of the meeting videos, and seeks to a certain timestamp like 53:40, so that I can refer to something specific that was said at a meeting.
Looking at the pages that are loaded when I follow the instructions in each case, I can see that there are some POST forms, cookies, hidden input fields, and so on.
Is there some kind of tool that I can use to create "deep links" to pages like these, that were generated using non-URL hidden state, which will allow me to quickly share what I'm looking at with another user?
What I'm seeking is similar to the frmget "bookmarklet", which changes the forms on a page to use GET instead of POST. Sometimes this succeeds in producing a URL which captures form submission query parameters. However, it doesn't work for these applications, for whatever reason.
This question is possibly related to the idea of capturing a web page's DOM state using "browser screenshots" and a script called html2canvas. A possible solution might involve getting and setting cookies in a bookmarklet. Ideally something that produces a normal "https://" URL would be ideal, but if it is impossible to solve the problem except by outputting a "javascript:" URL (bookmarklet) then that is acceptable to me (in spite of the security implications). Thanks.
question from:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65839333/capture-the-state-of-a-web-page-in-a-url 
