Re: Why Emacs should have a good web-browser

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> First, I would like to know if you agree about the reasons for having
> a web browser in Emacs (either as part of it or as an external lisp
> package).

I'd like to see Emacs support things like javascript better, as well as
web-browsing.  The Emacs/W3 way is sadly unworkable because of the
amount of effort this requires (compounded by the performance
limitations of Elisp).  Embedding a whole web-browser like Firefox might
be a good direction, tho it's probably too coarse to be satisfactory.
E.g. I'd like to be able to use Emacs's own completion code when typing
the URL or when filling any text in the page.

Maybe the most promising direction I can see is to try and make some
library (like webkit) render directly into an Emacs buffer (rather than
X11/Cairo/w32/plaintext/younameit).  Still, to make it handle tables
properly, we may need to extend Emacs's rendering engine to better
support them (which would be handy in any case for various applications
like list-buffer which should columns of data).


        Stefan