Glossary
The words ofweb automation.
What the terms mean, how they work, and the code that uses them.
A
- API discovery
- Finding the JSON requests a website makes behind its pages, so data can be read from them instead of from the screen.
- Await input
- A step that pauses a job until you, a teammate or your own system supplies a value the program cannot know in advance, such as a one-time code.
B
- Browser session
- A saved, named login state (cookies and storage) that jobs reuse so they do not log in every time.
C
- Canary run
- A scheduled test run of a program that checks it still works on the live site before your real jobs find out it does not.
- Captcha policy
- What a program does when a site asks it to prove it is human: pause and wait for you, solve it, or fail.
- Change detection
- Running a program on a schedule and being told only when the fields you care about change.
- Checkpoint
- A named point in a program that a job can restart from, so work already done is not done again.
D
E
- Extract schema
- The description of the data a program returns: each field, where it is on the page, its type and the rules it must meet.
H
- Headless browser
- A web browser that runs without a window, driven by a program instead of a person.
- Hosted resolve page
- A page Kaabist hosts where you, a teammate or your customer can answer what a paused job is waiting for, with no Kaabist account or integration.
I
- Idempotency key
- A value sent with a request so that sending it again does not do the work again.
L
- Landmark
- A named condition that says where a program is, such as being on the login page or being logged in.
- Locator candidates
- An ordered list of ways to find the same element, tried in turn until one matches exactly one element.
M
- MCP (Model Context Protocol)
- An open protocol that lets AI applications such as coding agents call tools provided by other services.
N
- Needs attention
- The state of a job that stopped because something got in the way that you need to decide on, kept so it can continue rather than fail.
- Network capture
- Reading the JSON a page receives from its own server while it loads, instead of reading what it draws.
O
- Obstacle
- Anything that covers the page a program wants to use: a cookie banner, a newsletter dialog, a product tour, a chat bubble.
P
- Pagination
- Reading a list that is split across pages, by following the next link until there is none or a limit is reached.
- Pick sample
- The value a field had when it was picked on the page, kept with the field as a permanent test.
- Program
- A versioned JSON definition of a web automation: its inputs, steps, extraction and policies.
- Program alias
- A name such as production that points at one version of a program and can be moved without changing the code that runs it.
- Proposal
- A suggested change to a program, such as a repaired locator, that waits for you to approve it before it becomes a new version.
S
- Self-healing locator
- A way of finding an element on a page that survives when the page changes, by trying several candidates and repairing itself when all of them miss.
- Session probe
- A quick check, before a job starts, that a saved login is still valid.
- Side-effect fence
- A guard around a step that changes something in the world, such as submitting a form or paying, so it is never done twice.
T
- Takeover
- You or a teammate stepping into a paused job's live browser to do the one thing the program could not, then handing it back.
- Tier ladder
- The order in which Kaabist tries ways of loading a page: plain HTTP first, then a browser, then a stealth browser, stopping at the cap you set.
W
- Webhook signature
- A header that proves a webhook came from the service that claims to have sent it and was not changed on the way.