Re: fine grained control of webkit browsing

[joakim@verona.se]

"Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com> writes:

> On Tue, 19 Jun 2018 18:19:07 +0200 Ricardo Wurmus
> <rekado@elephly.net> wrote:
>> Perry E. Metzger <perry@piermont.com> writes:
>>
>> > 2) Say one wants to do things like viewing something with
>> > javascript off and without loading remote elements (say because
>> > one wants to safely view some HTML email). What does one need to
>> > do to get this to work?
>>
>> The widget is not fully integrated into Emacs.
>
> It would be neat if it were. One would like, for example,
> to be able to move a cursor around in it with keyboard commands,
> copy text, and move back to another buffer and paste it without
> touching the mouse.
>
>> The extent to which one can conveniently communicate with the widget
>> is by sending a string containing a JavaScript program to the widget
>> and have it return a value.  Everything else requires exposing
>> Webkit API features to Elisp.
>
> Ah, so at the moment, this isn't yet at the point where (for example)
> one could safely use it to view HTML email. (To do that, among other
> things, one needs to shut off JavaScript and to allow programmatic
> control over which images are loaded.)
>
>> Attached is an old patch that I never submitted that allows one to
>> set webkit settings via Elisp.  Unfortunately, disabling JavaScript
>> for the widget also disables JavaScript evaluation of strings that
>> are sent from Emacs -- we use JavaScript for telling the widget to
>> scroll, for example. (See ___xwidget-webkit-scroll-bottom___ or
>> ___xwidget-webkit-show-element___.)
>
> So it would be necessary to tighten the integration a lot more in
> order to make this work as cleanly as one might like?

The original idea was to expose the entire webkit api to emacs using
gobject introspection. There is an initial attempt to do this in one of
the xwidget branches. That work is stalled. I think it would be a
nice project for some enterprising person though.

>
> Perry
-- 
Joakim Verona
joakim@verona.se
+46705459454