Re: Built-in HTML parsing and rendering library

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

> It's what Gnome uses so it's pretty good.  Because of the Gnome link it
> would probably be the easiest one to bring into the Emacs core.

Yes.  I had a quick peek at the interface, and it seemed to return a
nice DOM that could probably be exported to Emacs pretty easily as an
elisp list tree like (:html (:head ...) (:body ...)) etc.

And since libxml2 is already installed on 99% of Linux machines, linking
Emacs to it should be no big deal.

So the question is: If we have the parse tree in Emacs Lisp, would we be
able to render it quickly enough for it to make sense to use?  I haven't
really thought about it much, but it strikes me that rendering heavily
nested tables and the like might be a time-consuming task in a language
that's as slow as Emacs Lisp.  But it might be fine; I'm not sure at all.

Is there a component of libxml2 (or some other handy library) that does
HTML rendering, too?  :-)

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen