Re: How to make Emacs popular again.

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Tomas Hlavaty <tom@logand.com>
> Date: Sat, 10 Oct 2020 09:24:36 +0200
> 
> >> My point is that this should work even if you don't have
> >> a network connection, provided you have a local copy
> >> of Wiktionary.
> >
> > EWW is not the solution for that use case.
> 
> It is not obvious to me why.

Because for that EWW will need to be taught the relevant protocol,
wouldn't it?  Try this:

  M-x eww RET dict://dict.org RET

What do you get?

> For example, I've been using eww with off-line Common Lisp HyperSpec and
> it works well.  A key bound to hyperspec-lookup function will simply
> open relevant local html file.

EWW does support file:// URLs, that's why showing human-readable files
works.  But that doesn't mean it knows about any URL scheme out there,
it only knows about the ones we taught it.

A dictionary file is not just a human-readable text file, so inserting
its contents in a buffer is not enough to find a word in a dictionary
and show its definition.  You need to write the code which
uncompresses the dictionary, looks up the definition, and displays it.
And once you wrote that code, why use EWW at all for showing word
definitions, instead of having a command that just visits the
dictionary file and does that processing?

IOW, EWW is a handy tool for retrieving content using known URL
schemes.  It makes no sense to me to teach it about a "scheme" that
accesses a local file which needs special processing, because EWW will
not help us do the job, and it is much simpler to just read that file
into a buffer directly.