Altering what Emacs loads depending upon file being editted

Question

Currently, to use a certain plugin (nxhtml), I place the following statements in my .emacs,

(load "<plugin-location>/autostart.el")

Therefore everytime I open emacs, this is loaded, regardless of whether I am editing a file that the plug-in is applicable to (e.g. .htm). This loading is undesirable as it takes several seconds, how might I alter my settings so that this plug-in is loaded only when I am editing .htm or .css files?

Answer 1

nXhtml's autostart.el doesn't do a huge amount of work (it sets up autoload declarations in order to defer the real work until needed), however it can still be slow if you have not yet byte-compiled the library.

nXhtml provides its own command for handling the necessary byte-compilation (which is documented at http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/nXhtml/doc/nxhtml.html), so you can just type:

M-x nxhtmlmaint-start-byte-compilation RET

Answer 2

Not sure what you mean about plugins. For format specific code, I use hooks:

(add-hook 'sgml-mode-hook
      '(lambda () (setq sgml-indent-data t)
         (turn-on-auto-fill))
      )

Can you try loading the plugins in hooks?