Re: Why Emacs should have a good web-browser

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
>> 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.

If Emacs used the "high level" rendering component, I dunno how well it
would work, as an Emacs buffer is pretty different than a web page.

Most obviously, it's dynamic, and changing it is expected to be very
cheap even if the buffer is huge.

Another issue might be that, to the best of my knowledge, html rendering
engines tend to generate a "rendered" representation of the entire page,
no matter how little of it is displayed (as opposed to Emacs, which does
the most expensive processing mostly only the parts of a buffer that are
displayed).  This has obvious benefits (e.g., scrolling around after the
long initial setup can be fast, and your scrollbar can easily show
physical display units), but has obvious problems too:  displaying a 1GB
file might take a l.o.n.g time to show the first page....

I don't know how well these engines deal with the underlying text
changing; given that a small text change might affect the _entire_
"rendered" data structure, there seems a good chance the answer might be
"not very well."

But all of this is mostly speculation on my part...

-Miles

-- 
Bore, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.