reverse engineering js/html controls as part of development

Question

I'm starting a project with a big client that has several websites across the world, and they want to integrate them into a single Sitecore codebase/structure.

All good in principle, but there are certain navigation controls that we have to use but, due to organizational complexities, we don't have the other sites sources available (not that they don't have it somewhere, just that our team will have a difficult time getting a hold on it).

So we are left with the task of going site by site (each site is in a different language), looking at the navigation controls, and more or less copy html and js and use that. Something that doesn't sound impossible, but i've never tried to do this before and i feel somewhat confused about how to go about this task.

Edit to reiterate, we aren't concerned about translations nor do we want to grab the display text from the other sites, what we are after is obtain the controls code so we can use it locally. And with code i mean html/css and js. The controls need to look exactly the same as those already on production

Do you have any general or concise recomendations to offer?

Answer 1

If it is html and JS then you do have the sources, or at least the important part of the sources if UI is your main focus, available to you -- just snag it using whatever browser tool you prefer.

Having done a dynamic menu or four, my general experience has been you can port the logical theme of the menu but trying to directly port the code rarely works as there are lots of assumptions baked into most html and js as rendered for a particular site. One often ends up porting the concepts as things tend not to line up to the new site with the new features.