Emacspeak discussion list

[Tim Cross <theophilusx AT gmail.com>]

Hi Nick,

The issue you are encountering with eww is a known limitation of eww.
The issue is that eww has no javascript support. Any site which relies
on javascript to display content will not work with eww. This is a
common issue with many text based browsers, especially now that many web
sites rely on javascript in order to generate content.

In the past, some people have managed to find work arounds for some
sites by sending the URL through a 3rd party proxy which extracts the
conhtents into a normal plain HTML document - for example, google had
such a service at one time and you may still be able to do it using
something like google translate. However, results will vary depending on
the source site. Due to the growth of AI, many sites now have built in
'detectors' which try to identify pages being accessed by automated
scripts used to scrape content and attempt to block it. Attempts to use
various proxy services often fail because of this.

Bottom line, eww (and text only browsers generally) can be really good
with some sites, such as documentation sites that have minhimal
javascript requirements, or text based sites like wikipedia, but for
general browsing, you really need something like Firefox with Orca for
Linux, Safari with VoliceOver for Mac or NVDA on windows.

You will find that Emacspeak has some extensive extensions and
configurations which work with eww and other tools, such as xslt, to
make some sites more accessible using eww. While the combination of eww,
xslt, elisp and various other Emacs and Linux tools can be combined to
make many sites more accessible, these solutions do tend to be somewhat
fragile and take considerable tweaking to get working correctly. This can be
a great solution for a site you use a lot, but not a good solution for
general web browsing. 

Not sure why you would not see the same issues with a fresh Emacs
install. My guess is that the web site you are visiting in the clean
emacs config has a non-javascript dependent version which is served up
when it detects the browser does not support javascirpt or has
javascript disabled. Originally, this was common best practice, but just
like email clients which are supposed to provide both plain text as well
has HTML based content but don't, many sites these days only provide a 
javascript
dependent version and if you don't have or don't want to use javascript,
your out of luck. 

"Niclas Schmidt" (via emacspeak Mailing List) <emacspeak AT emacspeak.net> 
writes:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I am occasionally checking content of this list for quite a while now -
> and today decided  to use my current struggles with eww to say hello to
> this community.
> A few notes regarding my backround can be found at the end of this message.
>
> Regarding my current struggles with eww:
> For a while now, I get a "enable javascript"-page when trying to access
> websites through eww. I cleaned the content of ~/.emacs.d/url/ without
> any success.
> Trying out a clean new vanilla emacs, this behavior does not occur.
> Do any other ones of you observed a similar behavior? Do you have any
> idea, what else I could try to solve this?
>
> Best,
>
> Nicl
>
> About me:
> - using emac/emacspeak since around 2018
> - I am no software developer and still trying to find my way through
> elisp, emacs configs and writing own stuff
> - located in Berlin, Germany
> - working in consulting and design for inklusion and accessibility in
> digitals and architecture
> - playing ttrpgs 
>
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