Plain text (from Re: Avoidance variants)

[Mark E. Shoulson]

On 03/26/2015 11:18 AM, William_J_G Overington wrote:
> > Blocks of boring plain text, no italics or effects any more complex 
> than justification, simple notes written all in one font with no 
> formatting to speak of etc.
>
>
> I am wondering if it is considered a good idea to define into Plane 14 
> some formatting characters, so that plain text could in the future 
> contain italics and so on.

And we could define "plain water" to include sugar and flavorings, and 
have Coke run out of our taps.  But that isn't "plain water" anymore.  
And yes, we DO allow some additives in water and still call it "plain", 
even as we do have some formatting characters in Unicode and call it 
plain text (e.g. tab, formfeed, ZWJ, RLO, PDF, etc)

Alternatively, you could say we already have such things encodable as 
plain text, using character sequences, like U+003C U+0069 U+003E to 
indicate "BEGIN ITALICS", etc...  Just need the right reader...

~mark

>
>
> For example, written here with an asterisk included as I seem to 
> remember that that is the convention so as to avoid a suggested new 
> character being mistaken as an existing character, how about the 
> following.
>
>
> *U+E1000 FORMAT NOT ITALICS
>
>
> *U+E1001 FORMAT ITALICS
>
>
> *U+E1002 FORMAT NOT BOLD
>
>
> *U+E1003 FORMAT BOLD
>
>
> Traditionally such a suggestion would be refuted as out of scope for 
> plain text: use of markup would be suggested.
>
>
> Yet that was then, this is now: ideas of what can, or should, be 
> encoded in plain text have changed with time and could usefully 
> continue to change where that is of use to consumers.
>
>
> I have often wondered why use of markup is regarded as such a 
> requirement when the capabilities of plain text could so easily be 
> enhanced.  Expanding the capabilities of plain text would increase 
> interoperability.
>
>
> William Overington
>
>
> 26 March 2015
>
>
>
>
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