Encoding colour (from Re: Encoding italic)

[Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode]

On 2/12/19 12:05 PM, Kent Karlsson via Unicode wrote:
> Den 2019-02-12 03:20, skrev "Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode"
> <unicode at unicode.org>:
>
>> 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.
> And so would ESC/command sequences as such, if properly skipped for display.
> If some are interpreted, those would affect the display of other characters.
> Just like "HTML in tag characters" would. A show invisibles mode would
> display both ESC/command sequences as well as "HTML in tag characters"
> characters.
Very true.  Maybe the explicitness of HTML appealed to me; escape 
sequences feel more like... you know, computer "codes" and all. (which 
of course is what all this is anyway!  So what's wrong with that?)
>> 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
> I have no say on HTML/CSS, but I would venture to predict that those
> who do have a say, would not be keen on that idea. And XML tags in
> general need not be in ASCII. And... identifiers in CSS need not
> be in pure ASCII either... And attribute values, like filenames
> including those that refer to CSS files (CSS is preferably stored
> separately from the HTML/XML), certainly need not be pure ASCII.)
>
> So, no, I'd say that that idea is completely dead.

You're probably right, and CSS is practically a different animal, and I 
guess at best one would have to settle for a stripped-down version of 
HTML (in which case, why bother?)  And again, all this is before we even 
consider other issues; I can't shake the feeling that there security 
nightmares lurking inside this idea.

~mark