Re: “plain text styling”…

[Kent Karlsson]

> 8 jan. 2023 kl. 18:46 skrev Sławomir Osipiuk <sosipiuk at gmail.com>:
> 
> On Wednesday, 04 January 2023, 19:53:40 (-05:00), Kent Karlsson via Unicode wrote:
> 
> The advantage this approach has is that by using a separate class of characters, no substring of printable characters (including SP, HT), no substring of printable characters can be confused with controls for text styling.
> 
> 
> 
> I don't see this as a major concern. IMO, what people want from Unicode styling is one or both of these things:
> 
> 1. Extremely compact styling, made possible by assigning dedicated characters for each style

Well, depending on you ambition, you may have to define very many "dedicated characters for each style”.

> 2. Default-ignorable styling markup that neatly disappears if it cannot be interpreted, made possible by the existing set of default-ignorable Unicode characters.

In an earlier draft (not so widely circulated), I hinted at the possibility of mapping ASCII characters within a control sequence to TAG characters to make the entire sequence ”default ignorable”. But I removed that little hint, since I don’t think it would be a good idea (it would further overload the TAG characters; would not be compatible with ECMA-48; and may prevent future extensions unduly, indeed for SCI and math expressions (that otherwise has nothing to do with ECMA-48) I sometimes use a non-ASCII character after the SCI).

> ECMA-48 does the first not very well,

I’d say it does it quite well, at least compared with many of the existing alternatives. And in addition, parameters can be used to get quite a lot of formatting specified shortly, and fairly generally, for instance for colours use RGB values.

> and the the second not at all.

I did hint at one way of doing that (based on ECMA-48) at one point, as I just mentioned. But I deleted that hint.

Kind regards
/Kent K

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