Re: A road map for Oort Gnus

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

Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk> writes:

> It would need some more work to be really useful, but the real problem
> is that w3 is not integrated in Emacs.  WM Perry hasn't time to do
> more than minimal maintainence, and nobody else have volunteered to
> take over w3 or w3 integration.

I think that w3 is an essential Emacs component.  These days, most
information is out there on the Web, and to access that, we need the
URL library and the HTML parsing functions.  In short, w3.  It's going
to become even more vital in the future, what with all these
XML-RPC/SOAP thingies that are rearing their heads.

Are anybody at the FSF dealing with these issues?  It's not impossible
that funding could be found for such a project, if that's the issue.
(I suspect that it's more a question of time.)

> I think using w3 would be the ultimate solution, but we could invent
> an ad-hoc markup language for the purpose.

I think that would be counter-productive.  w3 is the way.  Who do we
bug to get things set in motion?  (I've Cc'd this to Bill.)

> Depending on how much control is needed, it could be build upon either
> custom or the widget library.  I don't think the programming part will
> be that hard, the real challenge would be designing the wizards
> themselves. 

If we had a proper framework for building wizards, I think writing the
wizards themselves would be quite a lot of typing; yes, but not very
complicated typing.

I envision a kind of rule-based framework.  "The user has input this
and this information, and this and this exists on the system, so we
present the user with this information and these choices."

I don't think writing that kind of framework would be trivial...

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