Re: [emacs-humanities] Extending Emacs Bookmarks to Work with EWW

[Karl Fogel]

On 02 Feb 2021, Oliver Taylor via Emacs-humanities wrote:
> Hello!   I have a draft of a note/article/post I want to 
> eventually share with the “community”, and I wondered if those of 
> you here would be interested in checking it for problems/errors, 
> or if you had any ideas to expand it.   I use the EWW browser 
> quite a bit (mostly via Elfeed) and recently learned about 
> Emacs’s bookmarks. I was disappointed to discover that while one 
> can bookmark files, directories, magit buffers, elfeed searches, 
> there is no such support for EWW. My note demonstrates how extend 
> Emacs to do that. 
> https://www.olivertaylor.net/notes/emacs-extending-bookmarks.html 
> Let me know what you think! 

That's a great post!

This got me curious.  I was somewhat surprised that EWW didn't 
already supply a bookmark handler function.  So I looked at 
lisp/net/eww.el in the Emacs sources and found that EWW actually 
has its *own* bookmarking
code entirely -- apparently, a totally different system from the 
generic bookmark.el in Emacs.  (Seriously: search for "bookmark" 
in eww.el and you'll see a whole other system implemented.)

While the EWW system doesn't predate bookmark.el (since 
bookmark.el almost predates the World Wide Web itself, it must 
certainly predate EWW), the EWW bookmark system *may* date from 
the time before bookmark.el bookmarks were made extensible in the 
way that your post describes... Well, I checked, and that's not 
the case either.  EWW's bookmark system was added in 2013, and 
bookmark.el bookmarks were already extensible in 2008 or 2009.

However, maybe EWW bookmarks are not exactly the same 
functionality as generic Emacs bookmarks, so that there is some 
reason why EWW has its own implementation?  I don't know.

Anyway, your post is very clear.  If you ever find out what the 
difference is (if any) between EWW's "native" bookmarks and 
bookmark.el bookmarks, I'd love to learn more, either here or in a 
new post.

Best regards,
-Karl