Encoding colour (from Re: Encoding italic)

Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Mon Feb 11 20:20:21 CST 2019


On 2/11/19 5:46 PM, Kent Karlsson via Unicode wrote:
> Continuing too look deep into the crystal ball, doing some more
> hand swirls...
>
> ...
>
> ...
>
> The scheme quoted (far) below (from wjgo_10009), or anything like it,
> will NEVER be part of Unicode!

Not in Unicode, but I have to say I'm intrigued by the idea of writing 
HTML with tag characters (not even necessarily "restricted" HTML: the 
whole deal).  This does NOT make it possible to write "italics in plain 
text," since you aren't writing plain text.  But what you can do is 
write rich text (HTML) that Just So Happens to look like plain text when 
rendered with a plain-text-renderer  (and maybe there could be 
plain-text-renderers that straddle the line, maybe supporting some 
limited subset of HTML and doing boldface and italics or something.  
BUT, this would NOT be a Unicode feature/catastrophe at all.  This would 
be purely the decision of the committee in charge of HTML/XML and 
related standards, to decide to accept Unicode tag characters as if they 
were ASCII for the purposes of writing XML tags/attributes &c.  It's 
totally nothing to do with Unicode, unless the XML folks want Unicode to 
change some properties on the tag chars or something.  I think it's a... 
fascinating idea, and probably has *disastrous* consequences lurking 
that I haven't tried to think of yet, but it's not a Unicode idea.

~mark



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