Re: Why Emacs should have a good web-browser

[Richard Riley]

Fernando <address@hidden> writes:

> Hello.
> Sorry if this is not the right place, but I wanted to ask some
> questions to the community and expose some arguments.
>
> 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).
>
> 1) One of the main purposes of Emacs is programming. Web development,
> css and JavaScript are emerging languages present a lot in the
> internet since a long time and now they are even extending to the
> desktop (gnome-shell, seed, adium themes...). Emacs has modes and
> tools to edit on this languages, but the integration is not as good as
> it could be if you had js and html interpreters integrated in Emacs
> itself.
>
> 2) There are very few web browsers that are comfortable to use in a
> keyboard-only interface. Emacs would be very good in this sense
> because its keyboard navigation is very usable and as it's designed
> for editing text, it will be perfect for all the form editing, comment
> writing and all the editing related actions you have to do often in a
> browser (editing wikipedia articles, etc).
>
> 3) Emacspeak  has turned Emacs into a very accessible environment for
> the visual-impaired and it would offer  these people a highly
> customizable interface to help them browse the web, along with the
> keybindings.
>
> 4) Emacs since long time has been one of the greatest tools for an
> operative system. During the Age Of The Usenet it was an good
> newsreader. Now that the newsgroups have started to die slowly and the
> HTTP protocol and Javascript are the kings of the big cloud Emacs
> should adapt to it.
>
> 5) Browsers are turning into the next generation Emacs! they can
> browse ftp, access IRC channels, check your mail, read pdf and other
> things with embeded applications, now they can even play video/audio
> as a core functionality, they are often used for editing text (web
> forms, comments in blogs, etc)... there's even the whole "Google
> Chrome OS" designed around a browser. Sooner or later they will be
> able to edit code (there's even prototypes for this already) when this
> happens Emacs has to compete or it will slowly die. Web browsers are
> turning into the main program for the end/power-user in a PC, when
> they reach Emacs in functionality I'm sure a lot of people (even Emacs
> users) would end up switching to hack Javascript instead of LISP.

You might be interested in looking at controlling/interacting with
Firefox using emacs. Google has more info. I use this below to "refresh"
my firefox when I save local web code. I dont know how well polished it
is. I guess there is a huge load you can do wit whatever that script
language is.


,----
| 
| (autoload 'moz-minor-mode "moz" "Mozilla Minor and Inferior Mozilla Modes" t)
|     (add-hook 'espresso-mode-hook 'espresso-custom-setup)
| 
| (require 'moz)
| 
| (defun espresso-custom-setup ()
|   (moz-minor-mode 1))
| 
| (defun auto-reload-firefox-on-after-save-hook ()         
|   (add-hook 'after-save-hook
|           '(lambda ()
|              (interactive)
|              (comint-send-string (inferior-moz-process)
|                                  "setTimeout(BrowserReload(), \"1000\");"))
|           'append 'local)) ; buffer-local
| 
| ;; Example - you may want to add hooks for your own modes.
| ;; I also add this to python-mode when doing django development.
| (add-hook 'nxhtml-mode-hook 'auto-reload-firefox-on-after-save-hook)
| (add-hook 'php-mode-hook 'auto-reload-firefox-on-after-save-hook)
| (add-hook 'html-mode-hook 'auto-reload-firefox-on-after-save-hook)
| (add-hook 'css-mode-hook 'auto-reload-firefox-on-after-save-hook)
`----