Plain text (from Re: Avoidance variants)

[William_J_G Overington]

> 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...

----

That encapsulates what I do not like about using markup other than in very precise limited circumstances such as designing a web page.

The characters have defined meanings in Unicode: HTML changes those meanings for the purpose of writing web page source code.

That use should not act as an Aunt Sally argument for stopping the addition of additional Unicode characters into regular Unicode.

Adding some additional characters for producing italics, bold and maybe colour as well into regular Unicode so that the facilities available for use in plain text format are extended. would, in my opinion, be a good thing.

HTML is HTML. There we are. The existence of HTML should not, in my opinion,stop development of the capabilities of plain text.
 
William Overington

27 March 2015