Re: [PATCH] (icomplete-vertical-mode): Add support for affixations and, annotations

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 24.05.2021 13:26, Daniel Mendler wrote:
> Of course this should be
> extensible, the data backend should be allowed to define arbitrary such
> columns. And then the UI can render some of these semantic columns
> specially (e.g. as Company is doing with company-kind).

That works for me, though I would approach this from the other direction 
and define an xyz-function for each column.

> But I am not in
> favor of extending the `completing-read` API with these `company-*`
> extensions. If such a semantic annotation extension is added, it should
> be non-namespaced ideally since it is not tied to the Company backend.

Yes, sure. Don't make them prefixed and document those attributes 
properly. This is orthogonal to all the other decisions.

> As I argued above, I don't think such support should be added. I hope we
> can find a better semantic annotation solution which encompasses
> company-kind, prefixes, suffixes and arbitrary rich columnar data. The
> question is how this should be done such that in the end the design does
> not get too complicated.

So far your columnar proposals (IIUC) have been quite different from 
what company-kind offers. And it more and more looks like something 
Company couldn't support.

Which is fine by itself, I suppose, but it also moves c-a-p-f away from 
the idea of a frontend-agnostic API.