Re: inclusion of emacs-w3m

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

On 6 September 2012 18:33, Stefan Schlee <stefan_schlee@yahoo.com> wrote:
> This posting may miss the spirit of this thread but anyhow:
>
> Have you tried using Conkeror (http://www.conkeror.org/)?
>
> As far as I understand this is based on xulrunner, but it behaves like
> Emacs.
>
> Because it is based on xulrunner it is a fully featured HTML-browser (Java
> Script, CSS, cookies, forms etc. support).  Normally I have an Emacs
> instance and Conkeror instance open, and because it behaves like Emacs I
> sometimes forget that I am interacting with the browser.
>
> Wouldn´t it be much more in the UNIX-kind of spirit to not reinvent the
> wheel but to use and combine the tools all ready existing?  Which means
> would it not be better to work on a really good interface between Emacs and
> Conkerer and relieve yourself of the work involving the maintenance of top
> notch Java Script, CSS interpreters etc..  For me it would be enough to have
> excellent access to the html-source, the DOM-tree, Java Script code, CSS
> files, cookies etc. in an Emacs buffers, and have the page rendered by
> Conkeror.
>
> Kind regards Stefan

That approach can have some benefits. A while back, I used some elisp
packages and firefox plugins that gave that sort of close interface -
essentially, access to the lower level stuff in emacs buffers and
reliance on firefox to do the rendering. You even had arepl that you
could interact with from within emacs that would manipulate firefox.
It was quite good, but not as good in some situations as the sort of
stuff you can do when everything is in elisp. If you have a look at
some of the stuff T. V. Raman has done with emacspeak and w3 you can
sort of get an idea of the potential.

To some extent, it gives you an interactive environment where you can
explore with new ideas regarding how you interact with HTML based
content. I may be a little outside the normal requirement space for
what most people want in this area. For me, rendering of HTML, CSS etc
is only part of the picture. What I would really like is the ability
to really impact/affect how the content is processed and handled. I
want an interactive environment where I can work on new content
handlers, content transformations via xslt, object extraction etc, but
do it in a convenient environment I am comfortable with i.e.
emacs/elisp.

Tim

-- 
Tim Cross