Re: Emacs accessing a mediawiki through an "automatice proxy configuration url"?

[Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null>]

Galen Boyer <galen_boyer@yahoo.com> writes:

> I can browse our internal company wiki with w3m but when I hit enter for
> editing, emacs does not recognize the editing section of the buffer as
> editable.  Any places I can look for customization hints?  Any different
> paths I should take? ...
>

What you describe sounds like your company's wiki must be using a javascript
based wiki - thats the only reason I can think of that w3m can't be used to
update it. 

I've been thinking about a similar problem lately. I would like to be able to
update our company wiki from within emacs rather than from within another
browser and I'd like a nicer environment than you would get just inside a w3m
form text area. 

A couple of things have come to mind. There is a wiki (PMWiki) which has an
emacs mode you can use to update the wiki. I've not tried it, but I suspect it
might be a good source of ideas for writing some mode that would work with our
company's wiki. 

One of the problems with wikis is that many have now incorporated extensions
beyond the basic/initial wiki markup. This makes a generic wiki mode unlikely.
However, there is also a lot of commonality which we should be able to exploit. 

One idea I've been thinking about is to identify the specific wiki "rules" of
our company wiki and possibly defining a compatible 'publish' mode for emacs
muse-mode. I don't think this would be particularly hard and would provide a
nice environment for creating new pages for the wiki. However, there is also
the requirement of being able to retrieve existing pages and update them. This
would need some sort of reverse translation from the wiki language being used
into muse-mode markup, which you could then edit and re-publish in the markup
the wiki understood. 

emacs 22 has the url package that use to be part of w3 and there are interfaces
to wget and curl, so it shouldn't be too hard to find a way of moving pages
in/out (there is also emacs webdav interface).

I expect it wouldn't be to hard to achieve a nice emacs based mode for editing
a wiki as long as that wiki isn't too feature rich. 

Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au