Plain text (from Re: Avoidance variants)

[Neil Harris]

On 26/03/15 23:27, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
> 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

Or you could just redefine "&" and "<" as

U+0026 START HTML ENTITY

and

U+003C START HTML TAG

and be done with it, and just incorporate HTML5 into Unicode forever, 
thus eliminating these discussions from this list, and moving them to 
the W3C and WHATWG lists...

-- Neil