title: Which of phantomjs or webdriver would be easier/more-appropriate for scraping my linkedin account?
body: <p>I have a personal need to scrape/automate-access-to my linkedin account (copy my contacts, etc), and obviously the site is too ajaxy to just use wget, urllib, etc. </p>
  
  <p>I <em>cannot</em> use the LinkedIn API, as it happens to restrict some use cases I'm interested in.</p>
  
  <p>I am proficient in Python and Javascript. I've used webdriver in the past for small scraping projects, but it was long ago enough that there's probably a similar overhead in re-learning it vs learning phantomjs.</p>
  
  <p>I am not planning to run any kind of high-volume cluster-based scraping operation, this is all going to be running on my local machine at some appropriate rate limit so as not to piss off linkedin. It's mostly just for personal convenience, automation, etc.</p>
  
  <p>I've heard good things about phantomjs, but I'd like to understand what if any advantage it has over webdriver (or vice versa). I guess phantomjs is "headless", meaning it doesn't actually have to run a browser, which I guess makes it easier to write command line scripts or consume fewer resources or some other property that I would love to have explained to me!</p>
  
  <p>I can appreciate the argument that webscraping programs should be javascript, since that's more of a browser-native language, but would love to hear if that's a primary reason why people are using phantomjs (or one of its cousins) </p>