On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 2:53 PM, Mohsen BANAN
<address@hidden> wrote:
>>>>> On Mon, 13 Jun 2011 12:09:23 +1000, Tim Cross <address@hidden> said:
Tim> For emacs to really be a good desktop environment in this age, I think it must
Tim> have the ability to provide access to rich web content - content that uses
Tim> _javascript_, html5 etc. It would seem there are two possible approaches to this
Tim> - do the necessary work in emacs or provide some mechanism that would allow
Tim> emacs to access and possibly manipulate data that is already partially
Tim> processed by a web browser such as firefox or chromium.
This is right on the mark.
And is consistent with what I meant earlier by
calling Emacs and Mozilla as joint sisters.
Below are my notes for add-on packages that I
include in firefox to provide some level of
integration with emacs.
The model of mozrepl is particularly promising.
http://wiki.github.com/bard/mozrepl/
Mozrepl permits considering Mozilla as an emacs coprocess.
Where emacs can execute _javascript_ inside of
mozilla. So, all we need is a lisp interpreter
written in _javascript_. We can then view Mozilla as
a renderer and an extension of emacs.
I know that people have tried building a lisp
interpreter in _javascript_, but as far as I know
such a thing does not exist yet.
I am very interested in knowing people's thoughts
on this approach.
...Mohsen
Hi Mohsen,
thanks for the info, it will be useful. I do think this has some potential and worth looking at. I would also like to see what cold be done with chrome as I tend to favor it as a browser over firefox these days.
The one thing I found when looking at this some time back was that the architecture can be quite fragile. This may be because of the bleeding edge nature of everything I was running, but it is an architecture which has multiple 'failure' points - firefox is upgraded and then mozrepl won't work untio a new version of that is created and then your interface with that won't work until ... ....
This may not be as big an issue once things become more stable. However, I'm very keen on interfaces which are as loosely coupled as possible to try and minimize this type of issue. However, I would agree the mozrepl certainly offered some interesting possibilities and something I do plan to look at in more detial when time permits. I do think a lisp interpreter is possible, though not sure it is absolutely necessary. I need to think about it more!
Tim