Re: Why Emacs should have a good web-browser

[Thomas Lord <lord@emf.net>]

On Tue, 2009-07-21 at 11:52 -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:

> > This is a very naïve suggestion, as I dont know much of emacs display
> > engine. I just notice that emacs wants to display formated text, with
> > hyperlinks, colors, pictures, antialiasing, etc. All of that (and much
> > more, like complex layouts, tables, etc) is already very well adressed
> > in an xhtml/css+js engine such as gecko or webkit, both free software
> > and available for integration in third party applications.
> 
> 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?).  So it'd be more like embedding Emacs
> inside a normal browser.  It's not a bad idea, but I don't think it'll
> provide as many benefits from Emacs's point of view.

It might make an interesting experiment for someone
who has the time and inclination to try writing an 
Elisp interpreter and Emacs primitives in Javascript.

-t