Re: face for non-ASCII characters

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Wed, 20 Apr 2011 23:38:12 +0200 Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> wrote: 

LB> 2011/4/20 Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>:
>> 
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."

"???"

Compare to 'You run (package-install "markchars").'  Which one makes
more sense for the users?  And even assuming nXhtml is in the ELPA on
its own, if they are browsing the list of packages, why would they
expect a web development environment to provide what markchars.el
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.

Ted