Re: ha ha, only serious

R> wonder if we could customise XEmacs with XML then I'm not sure what you mean. In --with-gtk, you have access to libglade for building dialog layouts (which would be saved as Glade XML), but nobody has tried to do anything with that that I know of. (For one thing, non-GTK XEmacs couldn't use it.) If you want a non-Lisp .xemacs/custom.el, the answer is "no, this has nothing to do with that." As Bill points out, redisplay.c would still exist; it's redisplay-{x,msw,gtk,...}.c that would go away. It would be pointless, anyway; xml is not a very good language for expressing procedural ideas. You'd have to maintain the Lisp interface for init.el. And anything that you would express in XML as "<tag>list contents</tag>" can be trivially converted to "(:tag list contents)" or ":tag (list contents)" in Lisp (up to tokenization issues, which would add points on the Lisp side since internals are Lisp). In practice, custom.el already mostly does look that way (custom-set-variables '(foo bar) '(baz (quux))) (custom-set-faces '(default ((t (:size "14" :family "LucidaTypewriter"))) t)) Granted, the form used as value for the default face is grody, but even there the actual face-relevant part is clearly tagged. So I really don't see much benefit to expressing that as <variables> <variable name="foo"> bar </variable> <variable name="baz"> (quux) </variable> </variables> <faces> <face name="default" initialize_now="yes" whatever_the_other_t_means_i_forgot="yes"> <size> 14 </size> <family> LucidaTypewriter </family> </face> </faces> -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.