Re: Running WebKit browser in Emacs!

["ian.tegebo" <ian.tegebo@gmail.com>]

On Friday, March 7, 2014 4:22:01 PM UTC-8, Daniel Hackney wrote:
> For another approach, see my old project Ezbl [1]. It used the XEmbed

And yet another,

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/eww

This approach is nice because it's pure elisp; the benefits could be manifold.  On the one hand, it doesn't require a custom build.  

On the other, I believe such an approach could be used to create graphical interfaces in Emacs for Emacs, e.g. Customize, but using the far more ubiquitous HTML/CSS languages as oppose to working directly with buffer/window/text-properties.  Going further, js2-mode already has a fair bit of what's needed for an EMCAScript implementation. There's still a mountain of work to get through, but doing so would make Emacs even better for javascript development.

Currently, I suspect the difficulty of understanding the Emacs/Elisp interfaces and rendering model are why we don't see more ambitious graphical features from the community.  To be clear, I'm not claiming that the Emacs/Elisp interfaces and rendering model *can* or *should* be simplified.  That may or may not be so.  My point is that many more people already understand the HTML/CSS interfaces and rendering model and that learning another is a significant barrier.