Re: face for non-ASCII characters

[Lennart Borgman]

2011/4/21 Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden>:
> On Wed, 20 Apr 2011 23:38:12 +0200 Lennart Borgman <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> LB> 2011/4/20 Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden>:
>>>
> LB> I do not know how ELPA handles this. (But I do not think there is any
> LB> problems installing all of nXhtml. Everything is autoloaded.)
>>>
>>> All I want is an easy way to display suspicious characters (as I recall
>>> from when we started this discussion over a year ago).  I have no
>>> problem that you're hosting markchars.el inside nXhtml and I can mirror
>>> just that one file into the GNU ELPA, but if nXhtml has to be
>>> *installed* in order to use markchars.el, I'll have to write my own
>>> version.  I think installing a large, unrelated package is an
>>> unnecessary burden on those who just want to detect suspicious
>>> characters.  Can you please confirm one way or the other so I know what
>>> I need to do, mirror or rewrite?
>>>
>>> Just to be clear, mirroring markchars.el does not require you to change
>>> anything.  The GNU ELPA machine will pull the latest markchars.el down
>>> daily, that's all.
>
> LB> nXhtml is not very much more monolitic than ELPA actually. You can use
> LB> just the basic libraries in nXhtml and get the rest downloaded
> LB> automatically when you try to access them. So it contains kind of
> LB> "ELPA" inside.
>
> LB> But that is not the point here, but since you took it up I mention it.
>
> LB> As I tried to say nXhtml will somehow be mirrored in ELPA and Reuben
> LB> has said that he want to contribute to that process. So please try to
> LB> discuss this witrh him.
>
> If you think about it, this is not a good user experience.
>
> "You should beware domain names with suspicious characters that are not
> in the same script.  markchars.el can do it."
>
> "How do I install it?"
>
> "You have to install nXhtml, a web development environment."
>
> "???"

Yes, the name and description is misleading. I have been waiting for
something like ELPA (with the additonal capabilities in that area that
nXhtml provides).


> Sorry if this is not what you want to do, but it really doesn't make
> sense to force the user to install nXhtml in order to detect suspicious
> characters.  So I think mirroring or rewriting markchars.el are the only
> options to provide a good user experience.  I can't think of any others.

You are maybe misunderstanding part of this. For me the transition is
the problem (and maybe the current lack of dynamic loading of
libraries from ELPA). I do agree with you where markchars.el should be
in the end. It should be in ELPA or Emacs. It is the road we have to
think about.