Re: Why Emacs should have a good web-browser

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> It might be possible to use one of those engines as Emacs's rendering
>> engine, indeed. To me, it wouldn't seem like an good solution to the
>> problem at hand because I don't think it would allow me to control the
>> web-browser from Emacs (e.g., how would I access from Elisp the
>> content of pages generated from HTML?).

> I am not sure I see what type of use case you mean. Like counting
> occurences of word « dog » in a page ?

Maybe not the one I was thinking of, but yes, why not.  Or opening a Web
page, and then navigating it with M-C-f, changing its major mode,
killing part of it and yanking it into some other buffer, displaying
various parts of that web page into a bunch of different (Emacs)
windows, ...

> I was mainly thinking about the benefits Emacs could get to entrust
> buffer rendering to a third party component. In the case of
> a xhtml/css+js engine, the advantage is that it is highly standardised,
> higly available, and highly maintained, so it would not be a potentialy
> dead-end dependance.

Yes, of course.  But the rendering from Emacs buffers to those might be
the tricky part (which would require maintenance and work just like
the current rendering engine to X11).  Of course, maybe it'd be easy and
simple enough to be a significant win.  As long as nobody tries, nobody
will know.


        Stefan