From: Thomas Lord <lord@emf.net>
To: Antoine Levitt <smeuuh@gmail.com>
Cc: rms@gnu.org, pmr@pajato.com, Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com>,
lennart.borgman@gmail.com, joakim@verona.se, emacs-devel@gnu.org,
monnier@iro.umontreal.ca, raman@users.sourceforge.net,
phil@shellarchive.co.uk
Subject: Re: An Emacs plug-in for a browser (Firefox?)
Date: Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:05:51 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <48C5778F.2020203@emf.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <6fa54e4e0809081007l68f1df2ei71450cf3483f2d17@mail.gmail.com>
Antoine Levitt wrote:
> Having browser windows in emacs would also allow allow users to
> benefit from emacs window capabilities (fuzzy completion with
> ido-mode, listing/filter with ibuffer, tabs, side-by-side splitting,
> and basically whatever else folks decide to code in elisp). Classical
> web browser basically have tabs, and keybindings to next/previous
> tabs. Emacs would make it much more powerful.
> Besides, as many people noted, it shouldn't be hard to do, since
> technologies to do so already exist. IMHO, the tough step is getting
> text and textboxes recognised by emacs, but even without that, it'd
> still be amazing.
> Good luck to you joakim, and please consider browsers as an equally
> useful target of embedding as multimedia apps.
It won't work, unfortunately. It's a lovely fantasy for
a nice system -- I like the sentiment -- but it won't (can't)
work:
Emacs has the concept that two windows can look at the same
buffer.
HTML/DOM/CSS/Javascript are based on the assumption
that only one window exists for a given page. This
assumption is deeply reflected in the APIs and data structures.
Imagining an Emacs window containing a browser view
of some page, any behavior you define for what C-x 2
(split-window-vertically) does (for example) will have
to be kludgey. Javascript expects a single window.
Events aren't tagged with a window. Geometry control,
spread over the DOM and CSS, is often in terms of the
absolute geometry of the One window. It's really,
really, deeply rooted.
This is one that W3C/ECMA got badly wrong, unfortunately.
There's no way to fix it thoroughly other than several
new W3C/ECMA standards that deprecate several existing
standards with which there won't be upward compatibility.
Basically, standards committees will need to pick a kludge,
describe that in several different standards, and then make
up entirely new and incompatible alternatives to the
kludge. They really messed up (if you believe that multiple
views on a single model are important).
-t
> 2008/9/8 Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com
> <mailto:cyd@stupidchicken.com>>
>
> "Richard M. Stallman" <rms@gnu.org <mailto:rms@gnu.org>> writes:
>
> > Switching constantly between Emacs and Firefox (e.g., by
> making Emacs
> > open links via a separate Firefox application) is inefficient.
> >
> > When you say "switching", what does that refer to?
> > Are you talking about a UI-level operation?
>
> Yes.
>
> > In what sense is it inefficient?
>
> In the same sense that it's less efficient to perform shell operations
> in a separate xterm, rather than doing M-! or M-x grep or M-x gdb etc.
> For instance, it's more cumbersome to arrange to view the browser
> display and side by side with Emacs, since the browser isn't
> constrained
> to an Emacs window.
>
>
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2008-09-08 19:05 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 45+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2008-09-04 22:18 An Emacs plug-in for a browser (Firefox?) Paul Michael Reilly
2008-09-05 0:16 ` David De La Harpe Golden
2008-09-05 0:19 ` David House
2008-09-05 2:42 ` T. V. Raman
2008-09-05 4:53 ` Paul Michael Reilly
2008-09-05 6:44 ` joakim
2008-09-05 8:53 ` Phil Jackson
2008-09-05 9:21 ` joakim
2008-09-05 9:30 ` Lennart Borgman (gmail)
2008-09-05 11:20 ` Antoine Levitt
2008-09-06 7:12 ` Richard M. Stallman
2008-09-06 10:48 ` Antoine Levitt
2008-09-06 21:04 ` Richard M. Stallman
2008-09-06 21:36 ` David Hansen
2008-09-06 21:49 ` Lennart Borgman (gmail)
2008-09-06 22:25 ` David Hansen
2008-09-06 22:48 ` Lennart Borgman (gmail)
2008-09-06 23:08 ` David Hansen
2008-09-06 22:41 ` Sean O'Rourke
2008-09-07 23:36 ` Richard M. Stallman
2008-09-06 16:42 ` Chong Yidong
2008-09-06 16:58 ` joakim
2008-09-06 19:42 ` Chong Yidong
2008-09-06 20:20 ` David Hansen
2008-09-06 21:54 ` T. V. Raman
2008-09-06 20:11 ` Stefan Monnier
2008-09-07 17:39 ` Richard M. Stallman
2008-09-07 17:49 ` Lennart Borgman (gmail)
2008-09-07 18:29 ` Chong Yidong
2008-09-08 9:22 ` Richard M. Stallman
2008-09-08 12:31 ` Chong Yidong
2008-09-08 17:07 ` Antoine Levitt
2008-09-08 19:05 ` Thomas Lord [this message]
2008-09-08 19:07 ` Antoine Levitt
2008-09-08 20:27 ` Thomas Lord
2008-09-08 20:34 ` Stefan Monnier
2008-09-08 21:33 ` joakim
2008-09-08 21:46 ` Thomas Lord
2008-09-09 8:11 ` Richard M. Stallman
2008-09-08 22:13 ` Richard M. Stallman
2008-09-07 19:55 ` Stefan Monnier
2008-09-08 9:22 ` Richard M. Stallman
2008-09-05 13:33 ` T. V. Raman
2008-09-05 13:32 ` T. V. Raman
2008-09-05 20:40 ` Christian Faulhammer
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