Re: Why Emacs should have a good web-browser

[Robert D. Crawford]

Lennart Borgman <address@hidden> writes:

> Is emacspeak in any way dependent on w3 or could it do equally well if
> emacs-w3m could use another web browser to do what it does now?

emacspeak is not dependent on any particular browser, it is just
dependent on emacs.  I can use w3 or w3m... both work equally well as
far as getting the content rendered to a buffer so that it can be
spoken.  The differences are mainly in what can be done in each browser
e.g. in w3 you can navigate tables cell-by-cell and there are some
limitations imposed by the underlying w3m that mean it cannot render
certain tags in different faces.

So, yes, if emacs-w3m used a different backend it should work equally
well.  I think the main point is that the web page gets rendered as
_text_, marked up in different faces to denote various tags and
presented just as any other buffer.  One of the nice things about this
sort of set-up is that transformations can be made to the text before it
is rendered.  A good example is transforming table based layouts so that
each cell becomes a paragraph, making it possible to read in a linear
fashion.

Thanks,
rdc
-- 
Robert D. Crawford                                      address@hidden