Ecma-48 proposed styling controls update updated & math expression representation proposal update

[Kent Karlsson]

Note that ECMA-48 is in no way new.

And it is still in use. It is used by terminal emulators, where HTML, RTF, troff, and other such formats are non-starters.

But this way of styling text is not limited to terminal emulators, it can be used also for text editors, even using wysiwyg editing. The gap between “plain text”, which many people use a lot, full fledged document editors (like e.g. MS Word) is too large.

(B.t.w. most HTML these days is generated from some other, likely proprietary, system specific, representation. Few manually edit raw HTML. But that is a different topic.)

(And… There are XML-based document representations that, iiuc, do not use CSS.)

/Kent K

> 7 jan. 2024 kl. 11:40 skrev Alexander Lange via Unicode <unicode at corp.unicode.org>:
> 
> 
> 
> On 06.01.2024 14:46, William_J_G Overington via Unicode wrote:
>> Perhaps in a Unicode text system a good solution would be for Unicode/ISO IEC 10646 to have some (not yet encoded) non-printing codes added in plane 14 that are treated as not control codes in most uses yet can be treated as control codes in specific situations. This would mean that a file containing them would not contain Unicode control codes so could be stored and shared as a text file, yet when applied to specific equipment of specific software packages could be treated as if containing control codes.
>> 
>> William Overington
>> 
>> Saturday 6 January 2024
> 
> This is pretty much the description of a communication protocol, or a declarative language like HTML. But usually it is done using existing printable characters from Basic Latin, so they can be viewed and edited easily. HTML for example uses tags like this: <p>My paragraph with text</p>
> It shows up as it is written in a plain text editor, but the browsers recognize the tags and show it as an actual paragraph, making <, > and the letters between them behave exactly like the new characters you propose.
> 
> I honestly see no benefit in having new characters for this purpose, only the disadvantage that the plain text would be harder to edit (and unreadable if they are actually non-printing, defeating the whole purpose of a plain text format).
> 
> Kind regards,
> Alexander Lange
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