Re: Flipping url-show-status default

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Fri, 01 Oct 2010 14:13:27 -0400 Chong Yidong <address@hidden> wrote: 

CY> Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <address@hidden> writes:
>> The url library is very chatty.  I think most users would get a more
>> pleasant experience if url-show-status defaulted to nil.  I mean, our
>> other network libraries don't issue tons of messages every time you
>> transfer data, so I don't really see why url fetching should be
>> different.

CY> I don't think setting url-show-status to nil is the right thing; it's
CY> pretty important to show something, particularly for synchronous
CY> fetching, so that the user knows the connection isn't hung.  But we can
CY> probably comment out some of the less important messages in url-http.el.

Why not show something if the connection is hung, which is the
exceptional case?  % completed, byte count, and MIME type are completely
useless information in the vast majority of the use cases.  So I would
make it `show-url-status' a choice of nil, t, or 'error with 'error
being the default.

The "wait" cursor is not a good indicator for data retrieval.  Maybe the
mode line can be updated with a numeric indicator like line-number-mode?
It doesn't even have to be a number.  A pulsating icon to indicate an
ongoing transfer would look good; it can have an overlaid A/T to
indicate the number of active and total (active+hung) connections.  In
text mode this can be done with spinning bars or something equally
obnoxious :)

Ted