RE: “plain text styling”…

[Doug Ewell]

Mark E. Shoulson wrote:

> That was sort of my question at the outset.  It doesn't make sense to
> call this "plain text" anymore, when it's formatted and styled.
> Styling is almost the *definition* of non-plain text. Unicode is all
> about plain text, where characters represent glyphs (or spaces) that
> represent text.  There are some exceptions to this: [...]
>
> 3. Emoji vs text presentation.
>
> 4. "Extreme" ligaturing involving emoji ZWJ sequences, regional tags
> becoming flags, and other pseudo-encoding.

I would actually consider things like bold, italics, and color to be less of an affront to “plain text” than an emoji presentation form or a sequence that adds up to “woman firefighter with medium-dark skin tone.” Granted ECMA-48 can be used for effects that are less plain-texty than bold, italics, and color.

> So I guess maybe we should restrict the discussion to those "updates
> and clarifications that are specific to Unicode" which you mention.
> What aspects would you consider those to be?  Things like what
> characters are valid to use in the codes or something?

Well, for one, redefining ECMA-48 in terms of Unicode characters instead of bytes, so that (say) one can have UTF-16 with styling, where the Escape character and the bracket and all that are 16 bits wide.

--
Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Lakewood, CO, US | ewellic.org