Re: versions of emacs/w3

[Lukas Loehrer <listaddr1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I too use w3m primarily because the Debian package of w3 does not
work well for me. There is a patch for emacspeak-w3m.el that fixes
the problems with forms and adds some XSLT transformations like
"linearize tables" and "filter search hits". It is part of the patch
available from:

ftp://ftp.rakurs.spb.ru/pub/Goga/projects/speech-interface/patches/emacspeak/

Note that I am not the author of this patch. It changes many files in emacspeak, but I only applied thos in
emacspeak-w3m.el. It would be nice if these modifications could find
their way into future versions of emacspeak as they greatly enhance
the usefulness of w3m in emacspeak.

Lukas

Tim Cross writes ("versions of emacs/w3"):
> 
> Its funny how people's mileage can differ in this area. Personally, I
> have no choice but to use w3m because I cannot get w3 to function at
> all from work - it just refuses to cooperate witht he authenticated
> proxy server at work - I spent some time trying to work around this,
> but as w3m works fine, I gave up as it was difficult to justify the
> time. 
> 
> I do use w3 at home from time to time, but have had problems with the
> most recent Debian packaged versions. However, with the exception of
> some errors working with forms, w3m is far more reliable and much
> faster than w3 and most of the time, the errors with submitting forms
> can be ignored as it still seems to work fine. Again, as Raman points
> out, everyone's mileage may differ.
> 
> Personally, I'd prefer to use w3 as I prefer it from a philosophical
> perspective and as it allows easier integration with xslt etc and
> theoretically, should be more easily customized. However, my
> experience has been that it more often fails than w3m when accessing
> the same content and I just keep running into too many little bugs
> which make its use too frustrating. 
> 
> I actually looked at the w3 code sometime back and had some
> discussions with people on fixing some known bugs (patches were
> submitted months ago for some problems, but they don't ever seem to
> have made it into the CVS version). I wa thinking about trying to
> contribute to w3, but work commitments are just too high at present,
> plus, unfortunately, there seems to be very little interest in
> maintenance of w3, especially since w3m and the emacs interface for
> it was released.
> 
> Personally, I suspect that unless there is a ground swell in support
> for maintaining w3, its unlikely to survive. The problem is that the
> web browser world moves so quickly and there are already good (for
> sighted users) alternatives available, like firefox and opera, it is
> likely to be difficult to find the people necessary to support the
> maintenance of an emacs lisp based browser. I think this is why w3m
> has become so popular - its fast, it only requires the maintenance of
> the emacs interface and there seems to be people willing to do that.  
> Of course, the question still remains open as to whether w3m is the
> best text browser available and to what extent other text browsers
> like links (with an i) or lynx (with a y) may be better. 
> 
> To some extent, web acessibility is still probably one of the main
> challenges to blind and VI users, not just on Linux, but on all OS
> platforms. Many of the windows commercial screen readers are doing a
> pretty good job, but again, it all seems to suffer from the rapid pace
> of change and the problems with keeping up to pseed. 
> 
> My suggestion for Peter is to use both browsers, w3 and w3m, since
> neither seem to be sufficient on their own. The lack of bookmark
> support in w3 is almost annoying enough to make it unusable (I've
> never understood why this support was lost as w3 certainly use to
> support bookmarks). 
> 
> Tim

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