Re: About the :distant-foreground face attribute

[Chong Yidong <cyd@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> The analogy would be if there was a :low-color-foreground face attribute
>> which would override :foreground on low-color displays.  That would be
>> ugly, as I hope you agree.
>
> I'm not sure I see the ugliness, please elaborate.

One face attribute should govern one aspect of how the face is
displayed.  In some cases, it may be hard to avoid having multiple
attributes with overlapping effects, but the results are not pretty.
For example, the interactions between :family, :foundry and :font have
been a source of annoyance over the years.  Introducing another such
situation should, in my view, be avoided as far as possible.

An example of a face attribute that handles things right is the :height
attribute.  An absolute height is given by an integer, while a relative
height can be specified by a float.  Allowing both in a single attribute
is good, because absolute height and the relative height are just
different ways to specify height.  We don't have a :height and a
separate :relative-height attribute.

The DISPLAY spec is another example of avoiding adding extra face
attributes---it allows different sets of face attributes for different
display conditions.

If I cannot convince anyone that there is a problem here, then forget
it.  I don't have time to keep arguing, so I'll just stop working on
this stuff.