Re: HTML5 the new lisp ?

[joakim@verona.se]

Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Dimitri Fontaine <dim@tapoueh.org> writes:
>
>> The idea that grows in my head is to have all the emacs rendering done
>> using webkit.
>
> I think a more fruitful path would be to make the Emacs rendering engine
> stronger so that we could allow real wysiwyg editing as well as nice
> HTML rendering.
>
> Of course, I'm not volunteering to rewrite the Emacs rendering engine.
> :-)

Well. The current display engine is not too bad at what it does. It
caters to a lot of usecases. Extending it to allow embedding of more
object types as is done in the Xwidget branch is IMHO a logical extension.

Extending the Emacs display engine so it allows for all aspects of all
webstandards is not reasonable. Improving it so that SHR for instance
can do a better job is another matter and quite reasonable.

Making a new port of Emacs to the HTML5 canvas might also be
reasonable. OTOH the gains and ease of doing this should not be
overstated. For instance, when I implemented the pretty basic Emacs
paradigm of splitting Emacs windows in two for the webkit xwidget, I had
to do a lot of GTK level hacking, rendering to offscreen bitmaps and
copying to multiple on-screen destinations. I haven't seen any mainstream
browser do this in fact. So, a html5 canvas is still just a canvas even
if its new and shiny and doesn't automatically give us all the stuff we
take for granted with Emacs.

-- 
Joakim Verona