Re: “plain text styling”…

[Asmus Freytag]

On 1/9/2023 6:13 PM, Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode wrote:
> On 1/7/23 06:37, Cristian Secară via Unicode wrote:
>> În data de Thu, 5 Jan 2023 01:53:40 +0100, Kent Karlsson via Unicode 
>> a scris:
>>
>>> More or less regularly there are (informal) requests on this list for
>>> encoding (new) control codes or control code sequences for text
>>> styling (like bold, italics, text colour, …) also for ”plain text”.
>> This seems to overlooks that a "plain text" subjected to such torment 
>> can no longer be called "plain".
>
> 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:
>
I concur, and my conclusion is that an ECMA-48 data stream is not plain 
text. It's just a different type of markup language, where there's less 
overlap between the character-subsets for the syntax characters and the 
content characters.

> Mind you, I think improving and upgrading ECMA-48 is a dandy idea, and 
> your suggestions for it are as good as any I've seen (which is faint 
> praise because I haven't seen any, but even from my own opinion, your 
> ideas are pretty good.)  And using it in "text" files is a thing 
> people have already been doing and will continue to do, though it is a 
> bit of an abuse of the term "text file." But I still don't really see 
> how it has to do with Unicode.  What would you have Unicode do?  
> Define a whole set of "formatting commands" as part of the Unicode 
> standard?
A very reasonable question is to ask: what changes if the content 
character-subset changes to something that maps Unicode (with a few 
exceptions either disallowed or reserved for exclusive use in syntax). 
There's certainly an audience here that understands the question and my 
have useful feedback.
>
> I think your ideas are good and I'd support them (mostly), just that 
> this isn't the place that decides such things.
>
However, as pointed out repeatedly and in different ways, real progress 
to where this effort produces something that is actually useful (not 
just theoretically usable), comes from involving people and teams that 
have an interest in wanting to conform to (and implement) such an 
updated standard.

ECMA-48 originally came out of ECMA, which, like Unicode, is (or was?) a 
forum that is based in and supported by industry and implementers. 
ECMA's preferred method to launch standards was to get them started and 
then pass them off to ISO at some stage of completeness.

That approach avoids design efforts being driven by people who have no 
stake in the details because they don't or can't be part of the 
implementation and rollout of software that provides these new features 
to users.

Unicode, we are all agreed, cannot be that forum, because styled text is 
not part of the remit, and neither is solving every possible extension 
of some other specifications to more fully use Unicode. So, while 
interested people can give well-meaning feedback, we can't really help 
move this forward - not unless we happen to also be part of some other 
organizations.

A./

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