Yeah, I'm aware of w3m but it would be nice to be able to just render HTML payloads in an Emacs buffer. About a year ago I saw a demo on Youtube of an embedded Webkit in Emacs but I'm not sure what the progress is there.
What I envision is something very close to Gmail's interface. But instead of just email the interface presents a list of items. Each item is of a particular type and each type has an associated renderer. A command box facilitates command entry and the result of each command is a list of these items. When an item is selected a view of the item is rendered. Items can also have tags associated with them such that we can filter item sets by tags. A resulting set of items can be piped to an ensuing command to produce another set of items.
Item renderers don't need to be read only either. For example I could issue a file search command that returned a set of files. By selecting one, if an editor renderer existed I could edit the result in place and issue a save command on the item.
I could take the paradigm even further. I could issue something like a project command that returned a set of projects where a project was really just a tag for an item which had metadata pointing to a directory path. After selecting one of these project items I might be presented with a rendered view of the directory's contents. From there I might be able to execute a build command on this item and the command would use the metadata associated with the item to build the project. The output would be a list of one item with the build results.
I've been thinking about this for a long time and the only apps I can think of that don't fit with this paradigm are apps that actually require a mouse or pen pad for input like photo shop or auto cad.
There are varying technologies which nibble around the edges of such a system but nothing that really implements it fully. Emacs comes close, the command line in a terminal comes close, Gmail exhibits aspects, Enso exhibited aspects but nothing exists which puts all the pieces together.
What I envision is something very close to Gmail's interface. But instead of just email the interface presents a list of items. Each item is of a particular type and each type has an associated renderer. A command box facilitates command entry and the result of each command is a list of these items. When an item is selected a view of the item is rendered. Items can also have tags associated with them such that we can filter item sets by tags. A resulting set of items can be piped to an ensuing command to produce another set of items.
Item renderers don't need to be read only either. For example I could issue a file search command that returned a set of files. By selecting one, if an editor renderer existed I could edit the result in place and issue a save command on the item.
I could take the paradigm even further. I could issue something like a project command that returned a set of projects where a project was really just a tag for an item which had metadata pointing to a directory path. After selecting one of these project items I might be presented with a rendered view of the directory's contents. From there I might be able to execute a build command on this item and the command would use the metadata associated with the item to build the project. The output would be a list of one item with the build results.
I've been thinking about this for a long time and the only apps I can think of that don't fit with this paradigm are apps that actually require a mouse or pen pad for input like photo shop or auto cad.
There are varying technologies which nibble around the edges of such a system but nothing that really implements it fully. Emacs comes close, the command line in a terminal comes close, Gmail exhibits aspects, Enso exhibited aspects but nothing exists which puts all the pieces together.