w3m and reading www pages with multiple collumns

[Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Paul,

I actually find both w3 and w3m are useful. For some pages, w3 does a
nice job and you get a very nice intergration with emacspeak. In other
situations, w3m is better. Depending on your distribution, it can be a
little time consuming to install w3. Debian has it as a package and it
is reasonably up to date. However, you really need the latest w3 CVS
version to get the best result.

While it is not an ideal situation, at
least with both browsers, we get a reasonable coverage. I think part
of the problem is that development of w3 stalled a few years back and
now with w3m, there is even less motivation for others to contribute
to w3. From an emacs perspective, I think there is more potential for
better integration with w3, but w3m has some advantages with respect
to speed and the rendering of pages. 

It will be interesting to see what happens in the future considering
the growth in use of Ajax. Some experimental work has been done in
implementing javascript support for w3, but I don't know about w3m. 

Tim


Pawel writes:
 > Tim,
 > 
 > Do I understand well, that another solution would just be start using emacs-w3 ?
 > 
 > Tim Cross writes:
 >  > 
 >  > There are a couple of things you can try. However, I'm a bit confused
 >  > as to whether your talking real frames or tables which put the
 >  > contents into columns. It just seems odd w3m would render frames in
 >  > one window/buffer as I cannot see how you would manipulate the frames
 >  > independently of each other.
 >  > 
 >  > The easiest is to mark a rectangle and use the command
 >  > emacspeak-speak-rectangle, which is bound to C-e R. Put the cursor at
 >  > the top left corner and hit C-space, move to the bottom right corner
 >  > of the column you want spoken and hit C-e R.
 >  > 
 >  > A second possible method, which I've not used yet, is to use and XSLT
 >  > transformation of the page and turn the two columns into a linear
 >  > page. Raman has provided a number of XSLT recipies which could help
 >  > with this - its probably easier to do using w3 as Raman has integrated
 >  > this sort of functionality, but I believe it is also possible to
 >  > achieve the same result using w3m. 
 >  > 
 >  > alternatively, you could change your w3m config so that it doesn't
 >  > automatically render frames. Instead, you will get a page with two
 >  > links (or links for as many frames as it has) and then you can just
 >  > read each frame. This is assuming it is using frames and not tables
 >  > which simulate a frame like layout. If you use W3, then the frames are
 >  > in their own windows and you don't get this problem to start with as
 >  > each frame is a distinct buffer.
 >  > 
 >  > Tim
 >  > 
 >  > Pawel writes:
 >  >  > Hallo
 >  >  > 
 >  >  > when I visit home pages that contain text in two frames, and then I read sentence from first collumn, it does not focus only on that collumn, it is, it treats two columns as one page and interleaves them while reading (I hope I explained it clear enough).
 >  >  > My question is: is there a way to force emacspeak focus on one column only ?
 >  >  > 
 >  >  > Greetings
 >  >  > 
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