Thursday, May 01, 2014

Emacspeak: EWW Updates For The Complete Audio Desktop

Emacspeak EWW Updates

1 Emacspeak EWW Updates

Within a few weeks, EWW has become my prefered way of consuming large amounts of Web content — except for simple fill-out forms, it has entirely replaced Emacs/W3 for me. Goes without saying that I still use ChromeVox for Js-heavy Web sites.

This article summarizes some of the major enhancements to EWW implemented in module emacspeak-eww; See the online documentation and key-binding help for complete details.

1.1 EWW And Masquerade Mode

You can now have EWW masquerade as modern browsers; note that some sites might serve you more feature-rich content in this mode.

1.2 Smart Google Searches

All of the features from module emacspeak-google have been integrated to work with EWW. In addition, if running in masquerade-mode, you can quickly access knowledge cards if available on the current results page.

1.3 Rich DOM Filtering

The suite of DOM filtered views has been enhanced to support filtering by class, id, role, or element-list. In addition, you can also invert these filters.

1.4 Structure Navigation

Emacspeak now supports structured navigation in pages rendered by EWW, see the key-bindings for details.

1.5 Integration With URL-Templates And Feeds

EWW is now fully integrated with Emacspeak WebSearch, URL-Templates and Feeds. This means that hitting g in an EWW buffer does the right thing with respect to updating the rendered buffer:

  • If viewing a feed, the feed is reloaded before it is rendered as HTML.
  • If viewing a url-template, the template is re-opened, prompting for user-input if needed.

1.6 XSLT Integration

Most of the functionality provided by module emacspeak-xslt for filtering the DOM in the world of Emacs/W3 is achieved more effectively via the DOM filtering commands in emacspeak-eww —that said, XSLT pre-processing is fully integrated with EWW via supporting modules emacspeak-ew and emacspeak-webutils.

1.7 Other Fun Things To Do

Here are some more fun things that might be worth doing:

  • Integrate PhantomJS with EWW to load content that is rendered via JS document.write.
  • Integrate with CasperJS to enable interaction with light-weight WebApps.
  • Integrate with Chrome over the debugger API to access the live DOM within Chrome.

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