How can I make a web-page preview

Question

I'd like to place a modal window with a description of an external page. But to give the user more information about the page he about to visit I'd like to provide him with a page preview.

I can see the following ways:

• render a page with tools like CutyCapt - not working on my hosting :(

• make the screenshot with external recources (I found some - all not for free, I would try to find free tools)

• show the page as it is using something like frame (frame tag is not supported by HTML5).

My questions:

1. Is there any PHP tools to render a web page to PNG image not so demanding as CutyCapt is?

2. May be I missed any worthwhile online tool to render a page to an image?

3. I never used "frame" approach earlier so: is there any pros and cons to go deep into it? Am I right that HTML5 analog of <frame> tag is <iframe>?

4. Did I missed any other way to do my job?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I once had a function on a page of mine which would load a specific page using an ajax-request and php-curl functions and then would just dump all the contents in a dynamically created <div> (Although I agree that the <iframe> is a better choice for this). But at that time I could not really adjust its size which made it kind of clumsy.