can jquery read the dom elements of external pages?

Question

Is it possible to read and parse the dom elements of third party websites like cnn.com (for e.g) so that I can get the div, a, p tags and read the position and size information?

Answer 1

No, you will be blocked by the Same Origin Policy, which restricts one site from accessing another on a different domain. You could set up a server-side script, in your preferred language, which would fetch the website on behalf of your JavaScript code, but this is more complex than just using AJAX to request the page.