Re: clutter integration in the xwidget branch

[Julien Danjou <julien@danjou.info>]

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On Tue, Jun 28 2011, joakim@verona.se wrote:

> Information about clutter:
> http://www.clutter-project.org/
>
> My example just loads a hard coded svg file into a clutter canvas inside
> emacs. This happens through librsvg->cairo->clutter-gtk. The example is
> much speedier than our current svg support, but can be optimised more
> still.
>
> So what's missing to get an animated GPU accelerated Gnu herd jumping about in Emacs?
>
> - research how to implement MVC with Clutter
>
> - research proper lisp bindings for Clutter. (so you need to read and
> respond to my other thread. You guys spend too much time trolling about
> mail setting and too little on my important threads :) Possibly one
> could benefit from Guile Clutter?

On Tue, Jun 28 2011, Antoine Levitt wrote:

> FWIW, I (and probably others) am very interested in your work, and am
> looking forward to the day I can run mplayer/chrome/a pdf viewer from
> the comfort of my emacs. I just don't answer for lack of knowledge :)

I am too very interested in the work done in that direction. I
understand that the finality is to control application in Emacs, for an
obvious win to us, Emacs users.

However, I'm not sure the xembed approach is relevant anymore, nowadays.
I don't think it will work on long term.
Many application can't be embeded, or won't work correctly when they
will be. Thinking that you will be able to control them from Emacs, is
naive, unless they have been though that way¹. Thinking that upstream
will fix or enhance their apps to be embeded, is naive too.

So here the question I wonder for days now and I need to ask out loud:

   Why not embed WebKit as a display engine?

I think Emacs would win on every side. The current Emacs display engine
is very limited (to be not rude). With such an engine, Emacs could
display image *properly* (with real position, in text flow, or
floating). It could play videos. It could have widgets that 1988 will be
jealous about. It could even display HTML correctly, something that is
needed everywhere nowadays, like in Gnus (see shr.el).

The only downside I see so far is the inability for the terminal based
engine to match such technical requirements offered by WebKit. I don't
have a solution for this, but would hate that it'd be the thing keeping
Emacs to a so low standard about its display engines.


¹  I'm thinking about uzbl.

-- 
Julien Danjou
❱ http://julien.danjou.info

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