Re: eww and Javascript?

[Rüdiger Sonderfeld]

On Wednesday 15 January 2014 10:18:35 Kenjiro NAKAYAMA wrote:
> > > Does eww run Javascript code?
> > 
> > No.
> 
> This qustion will be asked many times in the future. So I want to be more
> clear. At this time, eww has no plan to add javascript engine?
> I recognize eww is simple browser and it has no intention of adding rich
> function.

Well technically a limited support might be possible.  Steve Yegge wrote a 
JavaScript interpreter for elisp called Ejacs[1].  But providing proper 
JavaScript support would require implementing the DOM and then we would still 
be faced by the fact that Emacs display model is too limited for full HTML and 
CSS rendering (Although work on WYSIWYG functionality will certainly help 
improving what EWW/`shr.el' can render).  So all in all it would require a lot 
of work and yield very little in practical terms.

I think the main use case for EWW will be reading documentation written in 
HTML, bug trackers, and other simple websites.  None of which should really 
require JavaScript or fancy CSS layouts.  It should be noted that EWW does 
support some HTML5 features.  At least without JavaScript we don't have to 
worry about all the security and privacy implications.

If we want a "full browser experience" within GNU Emacs then the best bet is 
probably the xwidget branch and embedding an existing rendering engine.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/ejacs/wiki/README

Regards,
Rüdiger