Emacs/W3 is still the best Web page rendering option inside
Emacspeak given the ability to apply XSL transforms, as well as
obtaining aural styling via ACSS.
However W3's url handling layer often breaks when faced with
multiple redirects, especially when some of these happen through
the Host: HTTP header. Additionally,
HTTPS authentication sometimes fails mysteriously in
the presence of redirects.
In many of these cases, lynx happily fetches the
pages correctly; however you're then stuck using a fairly weak
auditory interface in that Emacspeak degrades to being
aterminal level screenreader.
An effective solution to this problem is to use
lynx within an Emacs terminal, and after finding the
content that is worth reading, handing off that content to
Emacs/W3. The next few paragraphs show how.
The lynx-site.cfg File
This is where you add site-specific configurations.
Here are the lines I have in my lynx-site.cfg to
integrate lynx and Emacs.
Before you use any of this, make sure you have executed M-x
server-start in your running Emacs, and make sure that all
is well by experimenting with emacsclient to ensure
that external programs can hand-off editting tasks to the
currently running Emacs.
#site defaults
#for bookshare:
DOWNLOADER:BKS Unpack:bks.pl %s %s:TRUE
PRINTER:Edit:emacsclient %s:TRUE
KEYMAP:???:EDITTEXTAREA # use external editor to edit a form textarea
PRETTYSRC:TRUE
SOURCE_CACHE:MEMORY
SAVE_SPACE:~/.wget/
BOLD_HEADERS:TRUE
PRINTER:W3:emacsclient -e '(w3-open-local "%s")':TRUE
Below, I'll describe what each of the above lines do:
-
DOWNLOADER:BKS Unpack:bks.pl %s %s:TRUE
The above line creates an additional item in the download
menu that invokes the BookShare unpacker.
Script bks-unpack.pl invokes the BookShare unpack
tool with the appropriate options.
PRINTER:Edit:emacsclient %s:TRUE
This creates an Edit item in the print menu.
Invoking this menu item causes the current page to be handed off
to Emacs for editting.
If you want to edit the source, first switch to source
view by hitting \ before invoking print.KEYMAP:???:EDITTEXTAREA # use external editor to
edit a form textarea
This sets lynx up so that when editting a multiline textarea, you
can hand off the editting job to Emacs. This is particularly
useful for editting Wiki pages. Replace the ?? with
the desired key sequence.PRETTYSRC:TRUE
SOURCE_CACHE:MEMORY
The above two settings make the edit source functionality more
pleasant to use.-
PRINTER:W3:emacsclient -e '(w3-open-local
"%s")':TRUE
The above creates a W3 menu item in the print
menu. Invoking this causes Emacs/W3 to display the current
page --- again switch to source view before invoking
this so that Emacs/W3 gets handed the HTML markup.
Script bks-unpack.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#$Id: bks.pl,v 1.1 2003/07/04 15:41:55 tvraman Exp tvraman $
#Description: Bookshare downloader for Lynx
use strict;
my $location="$ENV{HOME}/books/book-share";
my $password = 'xxxxxxx';
my $grabbed = shift;
my $target = shift;
my $dir =qx(basename $target .bks);
chomp $dir;
my $where = "$location/$dir";
qx(mkdir -p $where);
qx(mv $grabbed $where/$target);
chdir $where;
qx(echo $password | bks-unpack -q $target 1>&- 2>&- &);