Reading Web Content Efficiently

["T.V. Raman" <tv.raman.tv@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://emacspeak.blogspot.com/2013/11/reading-web-content-efficiently.html
*  Reading  Web Content


** Background

I still find reading Web content in emacs   to be way more
efficient than in modern browsers like Chrome with ChromeVox
enabled.
Chrome+ChromeVox is what I use for  rich Web Applications;
but when it comes down to reading straight content ranging from
technical documentation to news and current affairs, I find that
I can read a lot more content in a fixed amount of time with
Emacs+Emacspeak than I can with the Chrome+ChromeVox combination.


** Welcome  EWW: Emacs Web Wowser

The author of GNUS recently added package
EWW (Emacs Web Wowser) to The Emacs repository --- see his
[[http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2013/06/eww.html][announcement]].
Emacspeak 37.0 included a small addition called /shr-url/ that
leveraged his earlier /shr/ package; I've now added support for
EWW in the Emacspeak source tree. Note that  EWW is in the Emacs
source tree, i.e. it will be part of Emacs 24.4, but you can use
it now if you build your own version of Emacs, or obtain an
Emacs that is build from the Emacs  source repository.

EWW and SHR  are interesting because they both leverage
/libxml2/ to parse the incoming HTML. This is way faster than
the native elisp browsing used in Emacs/W3. In my personal
opinion, it also opens up more possibilities than Emacs/W3M with
respect to manipulating and filtering content from elisp ---
something that helps create   a better reading experience when
using Emacspeak.

** EWW Tips And Tricks

I've mailed out a small patch to package /eww/ that facilitates
implementing such higher-level commands; for now, you can find
that patch in _emacspeak/lisp/patches_ in the Emacspeak svn
repository. With that patch in place, you can do the following to
efficiently filter popular news sites such as the New York Times
(I use http://mobile.nytimes.com) or CNN
(http://cnn.com).

When visiting these and other content-heavy sites, try:

  - *A* :: Filter by attributes,
  - *E* :: Filter by elements
  - *R* :: Restore original contents

To flexibly obtain multiple views of a Web site.

--

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from the emacspeak list or change your address on the
emacspeak list send mail to "emacspeak-request@xxxxxxxxxxx" with a
subject of "unsubscribe" or "help".