Re: An Emacs plug-in for a browser (Firefox?)

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

>> I proposed years ago that we extend Emacs to the point where it can
>> function as a word processor.

>     It never struck me as an interesting goal: for one, we already have
>     latex-mode for that (i.e. Emacs is the only tool I use for word
>     processing, even more so now that I can display the resulting PDF with
>     doc-view-mode),

> It sounds like you are editing text with markup commands and viewing
> the formatted results on the side.  Of course that works, but most
> people prefer a word processor in which one edits the formatted text.

Maybe most people do, but I'm not sure if most Emacs users do.

> I proposed adding that capability to Emacs so that it would work in
> the mode people generally want.

But even in the event that most Emacs users do, I don't think that
turning Emacs into a WYSIWYG word processor is a good idea.  This said,
I do not intend to spend anny more time talking about it, unless someone
actully starts working on such a project (at which point I'll try and
convince him to work on something more likely to be useful).

> It looks like you are proposing a new feature which consists of
> editing HTML and viewng the formatted results on the side.  Is that
> correct?

No, I'm not suggesting any new feature, other than the fact that using
something like XEmbed to let something like Firefox render web pages is
a more promising direction than doing the whole rendering in Emacs.


        Stefan