Re: HTML-Info design

[Filipp Gunbin <fgunbin@fastmail.fm>]

On 28/12/2014 09:59 +0000, Nic Ferrier wrote:

> David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:
>
>>> But I can promise to keep working on what I've got and making it
>>> better.
>>>
>>> What else would I need to do?
>>
>> I think it might make sense trying to work out a roadmap that draws in
>> some helpers eager to prove themselves.  Problem with that is that those
>> might want to work on more "cutting-edge" solutions rather than what
>> simple browsers support.
>
> I never said I was supporting simple browsers.
>
> Emacs and HTML5 is what I am supporting. I can't see how I could support
> simple browsers, by which I mean Lynx, links, e-links, w3 and even
> eww.

emacs-w3m is also worth mentioning.  That's an enigma for me, why people
generally ignore it.  Is it flawed in some way? (like licensing or
whatever).  The approach it takes looks very natural to me: delegate
html & css processing to external program (w3m) and build a good Emacs
interface (emacs-w3m).  Its rendering of mail messages looks more
natural to me than eww's (this is not against the eww).  It deals with
tables very well.  It allows to disable tabs to make every opened page
be a usual Emacs buffer.  Not to mention the ability to separately
improve w3m (and get those improvements in console usage, too) and
interface (improvements visible only in Emacs, of course).

Generally I like the idea that tedious work in specific areas should be
delegated to some existing and supported library (like xml handling to
libxml2).

The good example is soap-client.  While it's great that some SOAP
support exists in emacs, I found it unusable for JAX-WS (Java web
services framework) SOAP services.  I wasn't able to fix it in a
reasonable amount of time (there were mostly namespace prefix - related
problems AFAIR).  Rather, it makes more sense to use some
well-maintained library to do the core job (though, I don't know whether
some exists for SOAP).

This is off-topic here, I know, but this problem concerns me for a long
time, and I couldn't resist, sorry.

Filipp