Re: search-invisible and friends

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>
> Cc: yuri.v.khan@gmail.com,  monnier@iro.umontreal.ca,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2020 16:56:54 +0200
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> >> It does, but I think only the code that generates the text covered by
> >> display property knows that its semantics are.
> >
> > What do you mean by "semantics" here?  The effect of each kind of
> > display property wrt hiding the covered text is known in advance.
> 
> If you have an image in the buffer, it may be something that has
> meaning, or it may be decoration.  If it has meaning, it would be nice
> if a blind user can search to it (for instance, if it's a button that
> can be pressed, then the searchable text might be "click to execute").
> If it's just decoration, then it shouldn't show up in isearch at all.

You are talking about adding features we currently don't have, like
alternate-text for images in HTML.

But I was worried about supporting the existing features that simply
hide text, and the desire to allow the user to say whether he/she
wants or doesn't want to find search matches within such hidden text.
AFAIU, that cannot be provide by Yuri's proposal, because that
proposal requires the code which ides text to be amended.

I hope we can come up with a solution that allows both use cases.