Re: Emacs/W3 needs DEVELOPERS...

[William M. Perry]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>     Another pain would be table alignment.  'stretches' might help here, but
>     I'm not too inclined to make major changes to the rendering code until the
>     redesign is finished and we use the document object model so that we could
>     render SGML and XML for free as well as just nasty old HTML.
> 
> Which redesign is that?  Redesign of W3?  Of a part of Emacs?

Emacs/W3 - the plan is to break Emacs/W3 apart into smaller components so
that other packages that want to use it (Gnus' various web backends)
would just need to load up / install smaller pieces.

The parts I see are:

- URL engine (the url package)
- HTML Parser (clean up existing w3-parse.el)
- XML Parser (reuse xml.el)
- SGML Parser (reuse psgml.el)
- CSS Level 2 Parser (clean up and extend existing css.el)

Then Emacs/W3 would just be a rendering engine that took all of these
pieces and pulled them together.  Gnus would just need the URL package,
and various parsers to do its nnweb magic.

There could even be two rendering engines - one nice and fast but not 100%
compliant (useful for rendering email attachments, etc), and one that is
slower but takes greater pains to look very nice.

More details plans are on http://www.gnu.org/software/w3/ if anybody wants
to take a look.

-bp
-- 
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