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

[Thomas Lord]

Antoine Levitt wrote:
> Having browser windows in emacs would also allow allow users to 
> benefit from emacs window capabilities (fuzzy completion with 
> ido-mode, listing/filter with ibuffer, tabs, side-by-side splitting, 
> and basically whatever else folks decide to code in elisp). Classical 
> web browser basically have tabs, and keybindings to next/previous 
> tabs. Emacs would make it much more powerful.
> Besides, as many people noted, it shouldn't be hard to do, since 
> technologies to do so already exist. IMHO, the tough step is getting 
> text and textboxes recognised by emacs, but even without that, it'd 
> still be amazing.
> Good luck to you joakim, and please consider browsers as an equally 
> useful target of embedding as multimedia apps.

It won't work, unfortunately.   It's a lovely fantasy for
a nice system -- I like the sentiment -- but it won't (can't)
work:

Emacs has the concept that two windows can look at the same
buffer.

HTML/DOM/CSS/Javascript are based on the assumption
that only one window exists for a given page.   This
assumption is deeply reflected in the APIs and data structures.

Imagining an Emacs window containing a browser view
of some page, any behavior you define for what C-x 2
(split-window-vertically) does (for example) will have
to be kludgey.   Javascript expects a single window.
Events aren't tagged with a window.   Geometry control,
spread over the DOM and CSS, is often in terms of the
absolute geometry of the One window.   It's really,
really, deeply rooted.

This is one that W3C/ECMA got badly wrong, unfortunately.
There's no way to fix it thoroughly other than several
new W3C/ECMA standards that deprecate several existing
standards with which there won't be upward compatibility.
Basically, standards committees will need to pick a kludge,
describe that in several different standards, and then make
up entirely new and incompatible alternatives to the
kludge.   They really messed up (if you believe that multiple
views on a single model are important).


-t




> 2008/9/8 Chong Yidong <address@hidden 
> <mailto:address@hidden>>
>
>     "Richard M. Stallman" <address@hidden <mailto:address@hidden>> writes:
>
>     >     Switching constantly between Emacs and Firefox (e.g., by
>     making Emacs
>     >     open links via a separate Firefox application) is inefficient.
>     >
>     > When you say "switching", what does that refer to?
>     > Are you talking about a UI-level operation?
>
>     Yes.
>
>     > In what sense is it inefficient?
>
>     In the same sense that it's less efficient to perform shell operations
>     in a separate xterm, rather than doing M-! or M-x grep or M-x gdb etc.
>     For instance, it's more cumbersome to arrange to view the browser
>     display and side by side with Emacs, since the browser isn't
>     constrained
>     to an Emacs window.