Re: An Emacs plug-in for a browser (Firefox?)

[Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com>]

"Richard M. Stallman" <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> It looks like you are proposing a new feature which consists of
> editing HTML and viewng the formatted results on the side.  Is that
> correct?
>
> It did not occur to me that that is what people were talking about,
> because it doesn't seem like much of an advance.  If we want it, the
> clean and simple implemenation is to run the browser in a separate
> process.  It could do the display in a window provided by Emacs, or in
> its own window.

I think the main point is that nowadays people use the web a *lot*.
Personally, the time I spend using a web browser is several orders of
magnitude more than the time I spend using a word processor.

Switching constantly between Emacs and Firefox (e.g., by making Emacs
open links via a separate Firefox application) is inefficient.  By
analogy, we provide comint interfaces between Emacs and programs like
gdb, so that people can continue using those external programs while
staying in the Emacs environment.

The difference here is that the relevant output of programs like gdb is
text, while the relevant output of a web browser is an interactive
graphical display.  (Note the "interactive" part, which is why
approaches like rendering into PDF aren't very useful.)  Thus, to answer
your original question, "embedding" means delegating the contents of an
Emacs window (or part of an Emacs window) to a web browser process, such
as Mozilla Gecko or Webkit.